Workers Daily Internet Edition Year 2008 No. 65

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Contempt for the Rule of Law

Was It Like This for the Irish?

Gareth Peirce, London Review of Books, Vol. 30 No. 7, April 10, 2008

The history of thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, as it is being written today, might give the impression of a steady progression towards an inevitable and just conclusion. The new suspect community in this country, Muslims, want to know whether their experience today can be compared with that of the Irish in the last third of the 20th century. It is dangerously misleading to assert that it was the conflict in Northern Ireland which produced the many terrible wrongs in the country’s recent history: it was injustice that created and fuelled the conflict. Before Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators who were marching to demand not a united Ireland but equal rights in employment, education and housing (as well as an end to internment), the IRA was a diminished organisation, unable to recruit. After Bloody Sunday volunteers from every part of Ireland and every background came forward. Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, "shoot to kill", the use of torture (hooding, extreme stress positions, mock executions), brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant: that the state was seen to be combating terrorism sufficed. Central to the anger and despair that fuelled the conflict was the realisation that the British courts offered neither protection nor justice. The Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday, which was carried out by the lord chief justice, absolved the British army and backed its false account of 13 murders, ensuring that Irish nationalists would see the legal system as being aligned against them.

We should keep all this in mind as we look at the experiences of our new suspect community. Just as Irish men and women, wherever they lived, knew every detail of each injustice as if it had been done to them, long before British men and women were even aware that entire Irish families had been wrongly imprisoned in their country for decades, so Muslim men and women here and across the world are registering the ill-treatment of their community here, and recognising, too, the analogies with the experiences of the Irish.

As good a place to start as any is 19 December 2001. On this date a dozen men, all foreign nationals, were interned in this country. Recognising the connotations of the term "internment", discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland, the government insisted this was not equivalent to arbitrary detention without trial, a practice forbidden by the European Convention on Human Rights except in extreme emergencies, because each man was free to leave. The premise on which they were detained was that the United Kingdom could not in fact send them back to their countries of origin, since it was accepted that they would be at the very least a target for torture, if they were not killed on arrival.

December 2001 did not in fact mark the beginning of Britain’s official interest in men described as "Islamists", since some from Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria who were in this country as refugees had long been the subjects of complaints to the UK by the regimes they had fled. After 9/11, however, Tony Blair professed a desire to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with President Bush. It would have been difficult to match Bush’s executive onslaught on constitutional rights in the US, by means of the Patriot Act; the designation of "enemy combatants" and their detention by presidential order; the abolition of habeas corpus; the subjection of detainees to torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo or their unofficial outsourcing via rendition flights to countries specialising in even more grotesque interrogative practices, many of them those same regimes which had pressured the UK to take action against their own dissidents. Claiming that a parallel emergency faced Britain, Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the "evidence" to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on 17 December 2001, and delivered to HMP Belmarsh, expressed astonishment: first at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted legislation and, second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had never been questioned by police or the Security Services before it was decided that he was a "risk to national security". The sole activity which some speculated might be the reason for their detention was their attempt to support Chechens when in 1999 their country was the subject of a second brutal invasion by Russia. But thousands of others had acted similarly, and such support was not unlawful.

Each man was told that, for a reason that could not be disclosed, he was in some unspecified way thought to be linked to unspecified persons or organisations, in turn linked to al-Qaida, which was then depicted by now discredited "al-Qaida experts" as taking the form of the hierarchical pyramid of classic Western military systems. At the base of the pyramid were those who had been interned, almost all of whom said that they had never heard of al-Qaida before 11 September 2001. All of this echoed other wrongful detentions, like that of John Walker in 1974, when the West Midlands police coerced an innocent Irishman into confessing that he was an IRA "brigadier", ignorant of the fact that such a title existed only in the British army. This confession was nevertheless swallowed whole. Walker was one of the Birmingham Six, all of whom spent 16 years in jail before the assertions of their prosecutors were finally discredited.

There should have been no need for the Muslim community to anticipate a similar wait, since just before Christmas 2005, three and a half years after internment had been rushed through Parliament, the House of Lords gave its judgment on that legislation in what should have stood as the most important legacy of British law in recent history. The law lords swept aside what had been said by the attorney general to constitute a just system necessary for national security. Focusing on the government’s disproportionate response to a claimed emergency, and its indefinite detention only of foreign nationals, the language of the law lords was heroic in its strength. There was a sense that the ruling’s importance went far beyond its importance to the 12 detainees, eight of whom had now been driven into mental illness, four of those into florid psychosis, and had been transferred by the home secretary from Belmarsh to Broadmoor.

Since the judgment, however, signalling as it did that the government had impermissibly crossed the legal barriers guaranteed by domestic and international treaties, it has become clear that the government intends to ignore the spirit if not the letter of the decision. It has also become clear that the government had, and continues to have, a wider strategy of which internment legislation was only one part. Little by little, ripples of information have found their way to the surface, sometimes confirmed by the government, sometimes denied. While the world knows and can assess for itself what chains of reaction were created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by the enormity of injustice suffered by the Palestinians, the cumulative effect of many other policies deserves analysis. It emerged for instance that in late 2001 the UK had begun to tip off other governments, for the ultimate benefit of the US, of the whereabouts of British nationals and British residents. Moazzem Begg, who was living with his wife and children in Pakistan, was kidnapped in January 2002; within hours he was in the hands of Americans (with a British Intelligence agent to hand), and transported without any semblance of legality to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, by this time an interrogation camp where torture was practised. After a year during which he witnessed the murders of two fellow detainees, he was moved to Guantánamo Bay. Until he finally returned to this country in 2005, nothing was known of the presence at his abduction of a British agent. Instead, for the whole of that year in Bagram, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office repeatedly told his father that they had no information about Begg and that the Americans would tell them nothing.

Seemingly unrelated areas of injustice, we now learn, have all along been connected. Two British residents, acknowledged to have been seized in 2002 in the Gambia and subjected to rendition by the US as a direct result of information provided by British Intelligence, were for the next five years subjected to interrogation (including torture) primarily to obtain information about a man interned in this country. One of those interned in December 2001, a Palestinian, trying to guess the reason for his detention the next year, told his lawyers that he had raised money for many years to build wells and schools and to provide food in Afghanistan. One of those wells, he said, bore the name of the son of its donor, Moazzem Begg. The Palestinian’s lawyers, knowing by now that Begg was in Guantánamo, started to think the unthinkable. During hearings at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, at which these cases are heard, there is a brief opportunity for the detainee’s lawyer to question an anonymous Security Service witness concealed behind a curtain, before the lawyer is asked to leave the court so it can continue its consideration of secret evidence. The witness was asked: "Would you use evidence that was obtained by torture?" The unhesitating answer was: "Yes." The only issue that might arise, the agent added, would be the weight such evidence should be given. Three years after this, in December 2005, the House of Lords affirmed the principle that no English court can ever admit evidence derived from torture, no matter how strong the claimed justification or emergency. The message for the government was again unequivocal: the principles of legal obligation must be adhered to in all circumstances.

Despite the strength and intended permanence of these two rulings by the House of Lords, however, many Muslims have come to see any protection from the courts as constituting only a temporary impediment before the government starts to implement a new method of avoidance. After three months of prevarication, the internees were released on bail under stringent conditions, but the Home Office was simultaneously pushing yet more emergency legislation through Parliament, this time to introduce Control Orders which placed a substantial number of restrictions on the now released detainees. Any breach would constitute a criminal offence carrying a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment. Three of the detainees, including the Palestinian, were pitch-forked out of Broadmoor during the night and driven by police to empty flats. One of them, a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offence, subject to a curfew and allowed no visitors unless approved in advance by the Home Office. Two of these three detainees were immediately readmitted to psychiatric hospitals; neither of them had been hospitalised before being interned. These men had already been found to have patterns of psychological damage explicable only as a result of their indefinite detention.

Other former detainees, particularly those with wives and children, soon began to recognise the disturbing effects of the Control Orders. The electronic tag they had to wear, which registered every entry and exit from the house, was only one element of a family’s altered existence; a voice recognition system was supposed to confirm the detainee’s presence at home during curfew, but the machines, of US manufacture, often failed to recognise the accents of Arabic speakers, with the result that uniformed police officers would enter the house in significant numbers at all times of the day and night. No visitor would come near their homes because to enter required first to be vetted by the Home Office. Children could do no schoolwork that involved the internet, the use of which was forbidden. Families had endlessly to involve lawyers in the most trivial matters: to obtain permission to go into the garden; to attend a parent-teacher meeting; to arrange for a plumber to enter the house.

What happened to these men? Are they still, three years later, trying to live normal lives despite the restrictions? The answer came only five months after their release. On 7 July 2005 bombs exploded in London. Within days it was known that the bombings had been carried out by young men born and bred in Yorkshire. On 5 August Blair announced that "the rules of the game have changed" and that diplomatic agreements were being made to deport the same small group of detainees to their countries of origin, although the government knew that the use of torture was still routine in these countries. It was said that an assurance would be obtained that the men themselves would not be tortured after they were returned, and that an independent monitoring organisation in each country would guarantee that this was being adhered to. Despite such assurances, these deportations flew in the face of two important legal commitments to which this country is obliged to adhere: one, to send no person to a country where there is a risk to him of torture, the central premise of the Refugee Convention, and, two, to achieve the eradication of torture (and not by negotiating a single exception, while offering no protest to a regime’s use of torture on others).

On 11 August the Algerian and Jordanian former internees were again arrested. There were soon more arrests, this time of two Algerians who had been acquitted unanimously in a trial at the Old Bailey in April 2005 of involvement in a conspiracy to use ricin, an allegation that had been seized on at the time of their original arrest by Colin Powell in his attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq to the UN. (One juror described how for him a moment of truth came early in the trial, when a witness from Porton Down nervously drank three containers of water while in the witness box seeking to explain why an early lab report said to have been conveyed to the police and confirming that there was no trace of ricin, had, curiously, never reached the Cabinet Office.)

Those detainees who remain in the United Kingdom are still in prison or under extreme bail restrictions. One has been returned twice to Broadmoor from prison before being bailed to a psychiatric hospital. There are now two more Jordanian detainees and several Algerians, while Libya rapidly became the third state to promise safe re-entry to its dissident citizens. As for the promised monitoring organisations, one was purpose-built in Jordan in 2005, a husband and wife team bankrolled by the UK, which by the summer of 2007 (when two thousand inmates in one Jordanian prison were beaten the day after the first ever visit of an NGO, Human Rights Watch, to whose representatives they had complained of torture), had still never visited a prison. In Libya, the independent monitor agreed to by Britain is the Ghadafi Foundation, headed by Colonel Ghadafi’s son.

Algeria never signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain, nor did it appoint an independent monitor, although both safeguards were said by Blair to be non-negotiable precursors to deportation. Constant prevarication was ascribed initially to the Algerian president’s ill-health, and then to meetings being postponed, until finally the detainees’ appeals against deportation could be delayed no longer. SIAC, hearing evidence in large part in secret, found that Algeria’s "body politic" appeared to have moved to "a state of lesser danger" for perceived dissidents, that a limited amnesty was on offer, so that the refugees would not be put on trial, and thus that it was safe to deport them. Several Algerians in prison here or under severe restrictions decided to return. As they said in a letter to a British newspaper: "We are choosing the alternative of a quick death in Algeria to a slow death here."

In making this decision, two of the Algerians, Benaissa Taleb and Rida Dendani, dramatically miscalculated. Astonishingly, SIAC allows secret evidence to be given even on the issue of an individual’s future safety. Had the men properly understood the reality (or more important the fragility) of diplomatic arrangements, perhaps neither would have decided to return. Each was told that an amnesty applied in Algeria which he should sign even though he had committed no offence; indeed special arrangements were made by the Home Office for each man to have bail to attend the Algerian Embassy in London for this purpose. Each believed that he would not be detained more than a few hours on arrival and that, as the British diplomat organising these deportations had promised SIAC, there was no risk that he would be held by the infamous DRS secret police. In fact they were both interrogated for 12 days during which they were threatened and subjected to serious physical ill-treatment. They were then charged, tried and some months later convicted, on the basis of the "confessions" forced from them during this time. Dendani was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, Taleb to three.

At the heart of Britain’s reassurances as to their safety had been the confidence that the Algerians would place too high a value on their relationship with Britain to risk its disapproval. No British official has ever attempted to visit either man in prison, despite reports that both continue to be held in conditions that violate every international norm; no official attended their trials and the fact that visa applications by the men’s UK lawyers have been ignored for a year by the Algerian authorities, despite repeated requests for help from our government, has been commented on with amusement during proceedings before SIAC as evidence of Algeria’s independent spirit. A desperate letter describing how he had been tortured was sent by Dendani from Algeria to the president of SIAC. It brought no response. Despite all this, it is still maintained that it is safe to deport people to Algeria. An application on behalf of appellants for a secret hearing at which information given to lawyers by those afraid of providing it in the open could be properly and safely examined has been rejected, not because SIAC considered the proposal without merit, but because the court’s rules, it appears, do not allow for such a procedure.

Is the treatment of these two men simply a blip in an otherwise safe and lawful process? Is it reasonable for the Muslim community to see wider significance in the treatment of such individuals? Over the past year it has emerged that Britain has secretly been willing to disregard the most basic principles of refugee protection. First, we learned that Taleb’s interrogation by the DRS was indisputably based on information received by the Algerians from the UK. Not only did Algeria possess the 2003 findings against him by SIAC (under the internment legislation that the House of Lords subsequently held to be unlawful), but it has now been discovered that the asylum claims of possibly all of this small group of detainees have been passed to the regimes from which they had fled. Asylum rests on the central premise of confidentiality, and a clear promise to that effect is given by the Home Office to all those who claim asylum here. After all, the contents of the application, or the very fact of its having been made, might create danger for the applicant if he returned to his country of origin. In the case of one man whose appeal against the Home Office’s request to deport him has not yet been considered by SIAC, we have discovered that a specially commissioned medical report describing his vulnerable condition has already been prepared by Belmarsh and sent to Jordan.

Taleb, known throughout his internment only by a letter of the alphabet so that his family in Algeria would not be at risk, arrived there to find that all the information about him based on secret evidence under now abandoned legislation was held by the Algerians, un-anonymised. Taleb had decided to return to Algeria in the hope he would be safe, and so no court in Britain had ordered his deportation. Yet the Algerians possessed all the British government’s "evidence" about him. His subsequent trial confirmed his worst fears. His Algerian lawyers argued, and he gave evidence of this himself, that he had signed an unread "confession" after spending 12 days in DRS custody and after having been beaten by his interrogators. The presiding judge countered by referring to the "West" and its "illusory democracy": "Weren’t you imprisoned, confined to your home for several years without trial, without charge and without respect for any procedure of either inquiry or investigation in a democratic country par excellence, Great Britain? No one in this court can teach us a lesson or put to us the least complaint on this matter, since in this country no person has been subject to such treatment." Taleb’s claim for asylum in the UK he saw as amounting to a "betrayal" of his country of origin. Asylum was accorded "only to those who hated their own country", and the judge commented at length on Algerians who had gone abroad and painted a black picture of the country’s human rights situation "to the benefit of NGOs whose time was spent vitiating the truth about Algeria".

Taleb’s eventual conviction was, curiously, for going to Afghanistan in 1991 to fight the Russians. In fact, he went to Pakistan in 1991 as an idealistic 18-year-old, where he taught refugees from Afghanistan; the Russians had left two years earlier. As for the amnesty he had signed? Not only its relevance but its existence was denied. The United Kingdom displayed no interest in any of this. The reality is that British Petroleum has sunk £6 billion into obtaining oil from Algerian southern Sahara; the US and the EU are scrambling with the UK for a slice of Libya’s economic potential; and Jordan, one fifth of whose annual national income is provided by the US, is content to act as its most reliable provider of safe destinations for rendition and torture.

In February, a judgment published by the European Court of Human Rights in the case of a Tunisian whom Italy sought to deport, although Tunisia continues to practise torture, revealed that the UK had tried to intervene in the case in the hope of undoing one of the European Court’s most important decisions, Chahal v. UK, in which the court insisted that the claim of a risk to national security could never trump a European country’s international obligation not to return a refugee who might be tortured. The European Court rejected this attempt in strong terms.

Through a myriad other routes Britain attempts to evade internationally recognised legal restraints. Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: "Get them back." Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: "This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?" The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor "benefit" without a licence. "Benefit" includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence. A few weeks ago in the House of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at "the meanness and squalor" of a regime "that monitored who had what for breakfast". The number of such cases now multiplies daily. They have nothing at all to do with national security, they only succeed, as they are intended to, in sapping morale; they have everything to do with reinforcing the growing belief of the suspect community that it is expected to eradicate its opinions, its identity and many of the core precepts of its religion.

In December 2001 it was a small group of foreign nationals who paid the price for Blair’s wish to show solidarity with the US; and their predicament has never been widely known or understood beyond the Muslim community. But joining them in prison today are more and more young British men, and occasionally women. Many have little or no idea why they are there, although even more disturbingly, the majority were tried by the courts in conventional trials before conventional juries. Why is it, therefore, that the accused do not seem to comprehend why they are there when the prosecution has in any trial to serve all of its evidence in the form of statements, in order to inform the defendant of the case against him? The answer is that the vice underlying the internment/deportation cases is now being perpetrated in conventional trials. The accusations are similarly inchoate: defendants are said to be "linked to terrorism" or "linked to extremism and/or radical ideology". In these cases, the evidence before the court has time and again been found after a search on a defendant’s computer or in a notebook; the defendant is charged with possession of a certain item or this item is held to demonstrate the defendant’s desire to incite, encourage or glorify terrorism.

The right to a fair trial is in many ways difficult to articulate. If a defendant believes his or her prosecution is unjust, does he or she have any concepts to hang onto that are not entirely nebulous, unless they can prove, as those wrongly convicted in Birmingham or Guildford did, that their confessions had been brutally coerced? Or in the case of Judith Ward, when it was proved that the prosecution had withheld for 18 years evidence that disproved her claimed fantasies, or that of Danny McNamee, in which the information that circuit boards identical to those he was held to have used were in the possession of an actual bomb-maker was kept from his defence and a fingerprint was claimed to be his when it was not. In each of these cases, bad, misleading and on occasion false "expert" evidence also played its part. Less well-known guarantees of a fair trial do, however, exist, just as clear protections for refugees exist, which were equally intended to hold good for all time and in the face of all emergencies. The relevant provisos, which underpin the right to a fair trial, are that the law should be clear and certain so that individuals can be confident that their behaviour does not transgress the limits society has set; that the application of the law should never be retrospective; and that there are protections intended to preserve freedom of speech, religion, thought and privacy. Young Muslims search the internet in their tens of thousands, as do non-Muslims. Any internet search, however, leaves an ineradicable trace which can and does provide material that puts its searcher now at risk of prosecution for possession of information that might be "of use to terrorists". They even risk arrest for writing anything that could be said to "incite" or "encourage" "terrorism".

This is the context of many current prosecutions. The fruits of a police search are uncovered, prosecutions mounted for the "possession" of literature, films and pamphlets bought or viewed on websites, even if that viewing was swift and the item discarded or even deleted. The defendants are stigmatised as potential terrorists and their cases considered by juries more often than not without even one Muslim among their ranks to provide what the concept of 12 jurors randomly selected is intended to contribute to the trial process – a reflection of the collective good sense of the community.

Two young Muslim women were separately tried at the Old Bailey last year for having written works deemed by the prosecution to be for a terrorist objective. One was the "Lyrical Terrorist", whose appeal against conviction is due to be heard shortly. The other, Bouchra El-Hor, was acquitted by her jury; she had the good fortune to have as a defence witness Carmen Callil, who witheringly described the letter that El-Hor had written as a classic example of the way devout women, whether Catholic or Quaker, Puritan or Muslim, experiment with creative writing as a means of expression while living isolated existences. The jury laughed at Callil’s savage critique, but one could see recognition and understanding follow.

This is very dangerous territory, however, where a lucky accident of interpretation is critical to a jury’s understanding of a case and where police and prosecutors, neither of them armed with any understanding of Islam, press on with prosecutions although the court struggles properly to understand what is at issue. Where the human story is straightforward, the task is far easier, but even so, now that secret accusations and secret courts have intruded into the sacrosanct forum of an open jury trial in which secrecy is not allowed, what is a jury to make of an allegation that a defendant has breached a Control Order imposed on the basis of secret evidence which holds that he is a risk to national security? On trial just before Christmas was a young Essex Muslim, Ceri Bullivant, who had been placed under a Control Order and then charged with a criminal offence when he absconded, unable to cope with the restrictions of that order. In his case the jury magnificently acquitted him on the basis that he had a reasonable excuse to breach his order. It was only later, however, in the High Court, that what lay behind the secrecy became suddenly clearer. Mr Justice Collins quashed the order itself; before he did so, an Intelligence agent giving evidence from behind a screen admitted that the tip-off which had led to the decision that Bullivant was a risk to national security and "associated with links to terrorists" had come from a friend of Ceri’s mother who, after drinking heavily, had phoned Scotland Yard, which failed ever to contact the caller to ask for further explanation. Equally disturbingly, a childhood friend of Bullivant’s told the court that he had been approached by MI5 officers and asked to spy on local Muslim youths. When he pointed out this was unlikely to be productive since he was not himself a Muslim, he was encouraged to become one and told that "converts are given a special welcome".

From a distance such blundering negligence might seem merely laughable, but those affected by it feel resentment, anger and despair. Why should young people as much a part of Britain as any other citizen require what are in effect interpreters to establish their innocence? The more religiously based the evidence, the greater the opportunity for obstinate incomprehension. Conspicuous by its absence in case after case is any evidence, expert or otherwise, proffered by the prosecution that attempts to explain the most basic concepts of Islam to a non-Muslim jury. Take the instance of a saying of the Prophet Muhammad familiar to all Muslims: "Fight the unbelievers with your wealth, yourselves and your tongues." Should a man who made a supplication in those terms in Regent’s Park Mosque on the holiest night of Ramadan four years ago, in support of the citizens of Fallujah who were that night defending their city in the face of the announced eradication by US troops of all who remained there, have anticipated that he might be breaking the law, or that he could be charged and prosecuted in 2008 after a friend’s home video of his prayer was found by police in a raid? He had, after all, repeated those same challenging words many times over the years, and explained again and again to the public, to the police and politicians, one of the most fundamental concepts of Islam, the Ummah, which makes every Muslim anywhere in the world the brother of every other Muslim, so that if one is attacked others are obliged to help. Should he be surprised to be prosecuted for having reiterated these same words of support in a mosque? The answer lies in Blair’s warning: "The rules of the game have changed." Previously accepted boundaries of freedom of expression and thought have been redefined and are now in effect being prosecuted retrospectively, with the result that our criminal justice system is becoming further distorted as many truly innocent defendants plead guilty, against their lawyers’ advice, terrified by the prospect, as they see it, of inevitable conviction and ever lengthening prison sentences. Thousands of others, all of whom have searched the internet, watch with horror the process of criminalisation and punishment.

In this country we did not grow up with a written constitution and human rights legislation entered our law only recently. In times of tension we struggle to find answers to basic questions. Are there rules and can they be changed? Are there legal concepts that protect a community under blanket suspicion, or should that community’s adverse reaction to suspicion be seen as oversensitivity in the face of perceived political necessity? Should we accept the concept of the greatest good for the greatest number? The answer is again the same: we are bound by international treaty and, belatedly, by domestic human rights legislation, to hold that there are inalienable rights that attach to the individual rather than society. Article 8 of the European Convention protects not only respect for family and private life, but also the individual against humiliating treatment; Article 10 protects freedom of expression, Article 9 freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and Article 14 guarantees that in the enjoyment of these rights any discrimination is itself prohibited. Occasionally, fierce campaigning successfully sounds an alarm: the proposed extension from 28 to 42 days of the time allowed for questioning those suspected of involvement in terrorism is being energetically fought. But there are less obvious erosions of parallel rights.

If this is indeed how it was for the Irish, we should urgently try to understand how significant change came about for them. Much current reminiscence ignores vital factors, such as the inescapable responsibility of the Irish Republic and, above all, the political weight of the Irish diaspora and the far-sightedness of those who began and maintained contact, long before Blair was elected and claimed the ultimate prize. Throughout the thirty years of conflict, forty million Americans of Irish descent formed an electoral statistic that no US administration could afford to ignore. It is said that on the night before he decided to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton watched a film about the catastrophic injustice inflicted on one Irish family by the British state. Here, Lord Scarman and Lord Devlin, retired law lords, joined Cardinal Hume, the head of the Catholic Church in England, in educating themselves in the finest detail of three sets of wrongful convictions involving 14 defendants. At one critical moment Cardinal Hume confronted the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, challenging the adequacy of his briefing.

No similar allies for the Muslim community are evident today, capable of pushing and pulling the British government publicly or privately into seeing sense. Spiritually, the Muslim Ummah is seen as being infinite, but the powerful regimes of the Muslim world almost without exception not only themselves perpetrate oppression, but choose to work hand in hand with the US and the UK in their "war on terror". It is for us, as a nation, to take stock of ourselves. We are very far along a destructive path, and if our government continues on that path, we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting. The choice and the responsibility are entirely ours.

Gareth Peirce is a lawyer who has since the 1970s represented individuals accused of involvement in terrorism from both the Irish and the Muslim communities.

Interview with Gareth Peirce
Moazzam Begg

Cageprisoners

MOAZZAM BEGG: Perhaps you don’t remember, Gareth, but one of the first times I met you, you said that, it was the Irish first and I can see now it’s the turn of the Muslims. This was before September 11^th had taken place. Did you ever envisage that we’d be in the situation that we are today that you would have to defend people who are held without charge and without trial again?

GARETH PEIRCE: No. I’m sure none of us, whatever observations we might have made, probably in the same way that people at the beginning of the conflict in Northern Ireland would never have envisaged thirty years of sustained nightmares. I don’t think we could ever have thought that things would come to how they are now.

MB: We both visited Northern Ireland, I think it was last year, at the opening of the Free Derry Museum and I was very taken by the powerful message that was given out at that meeting, at the opening of the museum, meeting many people, including Martin McGuiness for the first time in my life and seeing that people now were going through the peace process, had gone through a process which began in a sense with internment, and then Bloody Sunday followed as a result of that internment. Is it correct to say that what we have today is akin to internment? Is it the same? Is it different?

GP: I think internment, as it was imposed upon the Nationalist community, was probably the wake up call to the Nationalist movement that they had to stand up and fight. And the repression of protests against internment in particular, the civil rights marches and the murders by British soldiers of civilians on Bloody Sunday, those were the ways in which the armed conflict in fact began and fuelled volunteers enlisting because there was no other way. And I think probably looking back it would not…We’re all aware that, looking back, Nationalists in Northern Ireland would now say we would never have advanced to the point of shared power in Northern Ireland had there not been an armed conflict - that’s the way retrospectively history would be viewed. But equally looking back it would be seen that there would never have been an armed conflict and should never have been an armed conflict if equality and sharing of power had ever been there in the first place; so it’s become a circular route of history, and the lesson, I suppose, we learn is those thirty years of conflict need never have happened and that’s perhaps what is now so frighteningly clear. We needn’t be in the situation we are in now, we simply need not be in it and there are so many ways in which the state is viewing people and acting towards them and implementing legislation to deal with those people that’s just plain wrong and it’s mad, it’s a completely mad construction in relation to many of the people who are at the receiving end.

MB: Is there a parallel? Do you see something happening at that time that is happening again? Or is it different?

GP: If one takes the straight parallel of internment it’s a pretty even equation. There was just a locking up of the wrong people as a symbolic exercise to achieve a political end. To that extent, our internment in 2001 was a very similar exercise. However, were one to be a member of the Muslim community in this country now, I think there would be a different feeling than to have been a member of the Irish community in the past and I think that there was all along a comprehension by the politicised Irish community that allies were needed, political allies were needed, no matter the extent of the armed conflict that was raging; that somewhere along the line there needed to be a progressive, political dialogue - even if it was not with the British state, with allies: the Irish government, or Irish Americans or the worldwide community. It is much harder now, I would think, to identify political allies in the world. The allies that the Muslim community deserves to have appear to come from informed NGOs, campaigning organisations who comprehend the attack that is being made on human rights, rather than organisations, countries, regimes, administrations, that comprehend that there has to be a political shift. It’s more a comprehension of how the law has been distorted, that appears to be the only lifeline to hang onto, more than a way of moving towards a recognition that the world cannot go on like this; we cannot go on with this level of political and religious incomprehension. We cannot. We are in a state of grave danger.

MB: The day I returned from Guantanamo and I met you and spoke to you, you told me the next day you could not be there with me for the interviews with the police because you told me you had to rush off to the House of Lords to issue a decision in the case of the internment, the Belmarsh detainees. I still never really understood what that meant in terms of a decision being made by the most powerful legal body in the country and then in practical, tangible terms, it meant nothing, when they were re-arrested. Can you just explain that to me?

GP: The government had gone through a number of deceits. It had told the Council of Europe that in December 2001 this country was facing a grave emergency so that the fabric of the nation was threatened, so that a dozen men had to be locked up indefinitely without trial. That was never true. The factual claim was false for all to see. The legal claim sustained itself over three and a half years until the House of Lords ruled. That was a significant victory in a number of ways. It reaffirmed that the courts in this country were capable of assessing and delivering a profoundly moral message; that we will not stoop to that kind of legislation, we simply will not, whatever the odds. But all of that legislation came in on the excuse of 9/11, which frankly had nothing to do with this country until we made it something to do with this country. But there followed thereafter another excuse, and that was the bombings in London of July 7^th, five months after the interned men were released.

MB: And were these men ever said to have any link, or any association?

GP: No, nothing, absolutely nothing, whatsoever. They were young British men, very quickly within a couple of days from Leeds known to have carried out the bombings on their own; not Arabic speakers, British nationals. There has never been any suggestion that they were motivated by, inspired by, connected with the foreign national Arabic speaking Algerians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Libyans who have been interned. Nothing to do with them. However, within days the Prime Minister again took the same group of men for his symbolic response. This country is going to face up to this grave emergency. How? By changing the rules of the game. This is what he said, changing the rules of the game. How does he do it? He will lock up these men once again and this time, deport them to their own countries who will torture them and probably kill them. For three and a half years, he had said we can’t deport them because they’ll be tortured and therefore we will lock them up indefinitely without trial. Now he was saying suddenly overnight that we can…

MB: Based on the infamous memorandums of understanding.

GP: Although with Algeria, they didn’t ever achieve a memorandum of understanding, in the end they gave up, but nevertheless the deportations were ordered. The same tiny little group of men who were there to become the scapegoats for the administration to show that they were tough on terror, shoulder to shoulder with Bush, dealing with an emergency in an utterly illogical, false, unjustified way/ But it didn’t really matter to the mass of this country because these were outcasts, outcasts from society. They didn’t belong, they were foreigners, they had no rights - that’s how in general we perceive it here.

MB: These men have become, as you’ve said, outcasts and it would have been understandable had they been charged with a crime or had some evidence been put forward about them being involved in some sort of activity against the British government or in general. But that’s never happened. And I remember you told me that they’ve not even been interrogated.

GP: No, no they’ve not ever been questioned. There’s much debate as to whether the police need powers to question people for 7, 14, 28, 90 days. They’ve never been questioned at all, never.

MB: And the Security Services have never asked a question about them?

GP: No, no, no, no. No, they’ve made an assessment. What the assessment is we don’t know because the processes that have been constructed are to have courts that hear secret evidence so that the person himself will not know the evidence.

MB: I remember when you wrote to me in Guantanamo Bay, one of the things you told me about, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which was this sort of kangaroo court, which didn’t have any legal jurisdiction and you told me I shouldn’t take part in it because it’s something that includes secret evidence, you don’t get witnesses, there’s no appeals process – in fact there’s no process, it’s simply a military panel making a decision on your life. This seems to me…

GP: It was somewhat hypocritical of me to write that, wasn’t it? Given what was happening here.

MB: Because the lawyer also does not get the right of hearing the evidence, also.

GP: Yes.

MB: And this is where they determine a person’s – not guilt, because they have not been charged with a crime – but a person’s security threat level almost. And as a result of these secret proceedings they are either continually kept in prison or put out under a strict regime of control orders, or have placed upon them UN sanctions, or in some cases get deported or extradited. The average person would be extremely surprised to hear this, to learn that these great terrorist threats to this country have not even been questioned. How does the government respond when you ask them to produce the evidence, to say what is it that my clients have done for which they are paying this ultimate price?

GP: Well, one discovers there’s been a range of dishonesty here to get the legislation through Parliament, internment in the first place in 2001. A number of Parliamentarians quite rightly said that we have jury trial in this country, we have proper process of accusation; and they were reassured that this would also be a last resort if this legislation comes in and there will always have been a careful decision by the Crown Prosecution Service before we resort to the last resort of secret evidence. But after these men were arrested, we wrote to the Crown Prosecution Service, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and said please just tell us the dates when you took these decisions not to prosecute and who took the decision, what did they have in front of them. When the letter came back, saying actually we never took a decision at all, about any of them. So the legislation was passed on a fraudulent basis in the first place but it is sustained itself even when that legislation was condemned by the House of Lords; its message continues and its decision continues in that the same men were made the subject of control orders, released to forms of home house arrest, again on secret evidence and then some of them made available for deportation, again on secret evidence. But in fact, worse was to come, because we now have discovered that the government has sent the findings of this secret court to each regime, each torturing regime to which it wishes to send this particular group of men. It is a complete breach of every guarantee given to every asylum seeker that your application for asylum will be treated in confidence. We’ve sent the asylum claims to Algeria, and Jordan and probably Libya, and therefore we have placed the same hapless group of men at even further risk – we’ve sent their asylum claims, and we’ve sent the findings of SIAC – the Immigration Appeals Commission that has considered secret evidence. And when one man, Benaissa Taleb, an Algerian, went back in despair - although he was on bail here the conditions were so horrific he decided he would risk torture to leave his wife and daughter here with the ability to have a better life, in the hopes he would not be detained. He was detained; he was tortured, interrogated, charged on the basis of a false confession obtained from torture. And at his trial, the Algerian judge said, "How dare you claim asylum in another country, that’s a betrayal of our country, Algeria. It is an absolute treacherous betrayal to have claimed asylum." So the very fact of claiming asylum…

MB: …is itself guiltworthy (18:53) it’s devastated people’s lives. It’s destroyed, not just the men and their ability to be men for their families, but also the effects - whether it’s imprisonment without trial, whether it’s the control order regime – I’ve spoken to several people, either the prisoners or under control orders who speak of finding this a paradox in Britain, of a country that is supposed to be one of the bastions of freedom, liberty and justice, where in fact many of them had sought asylum for that reason in the United Kingdom, and laws are being created specifically for these men; men who still have not been charged with a crime. Some of them, as you said have correctly, opted to return home facing torture; one I’ve spoken to recently, Abu Rideh, is on hunger strike, has tried to harm himself, as a result of these strict measures that he has on him. His family life is completely upside down as a result of it. Is there any hope for them at all?

GP: For a long time, in a probably misleadingly, not intentionally, lawyers have said to the men there is hope, this legislation can’t be right. We can win internment. Control orders can’t be right; we can win this in courts. Deportation to countries that torture, with memorandums of understanding, can’t be right; we could win this. But the people we represent become very tired and very cynical and very disbelieving. They will say perhaps you were right but it took three and a half years for internment to be overturned. Perhaps you were right about deportation, but we have been in prison now for three years - another three years, on top of the three and a half from internment. And those men will say even if we win, look at the cost to our families or to the community and - even more cynically - if we win, the government will simply introduce something else. So the prospect of normality of life has become nil and it’s an endurance test in which the government has all the time in the world on its side and men see their lives disappearing; young men who are single see no prospect of ever being able to marry and have a family; men who are married with children, see the children growing up without fathers at all; or with fathers at home in circumstances that are destructive of a normal family life. I think, to be frank, people given a choice would never, never want to be here. Refugees would never have chosen to come here if they’d ever known this was ahead of them and if there were any prospect of another country, a safe third country, no one would be here for a moment. But what we’re doing is meant to be sending a message to the world, isn’t it? We’re not acting only in relation to our domestic borders; we’re trying to encourage other countries to behave in the same way.

MB: I had a meeting with a judge, a judge advocate, a general from the US military about three weeks ago. He was so adamant that detainees’ cases in Guantanamo could be won, through fighting their case in the court and ultimately to the Supreme Court. In fact, he felt so confident that the tie he had on which had Supreme Court frontages on it, he took off during dinner and gave it to me. And I thought to myself, no one has been released from Guantanamo as the result of any legal proceeding, even when the Supreme Court decision was passed, in Rasul vs Bush. But at least in the cases in Guantánamo and in my case in particular, when you were working on it, there was a public outcry, eventually. And that is what ended up securing or bringing about our release to the embarrassment and so forth, but in the case of the men here who are held, not in similar circumstances, but under similar attitudes of the law, or of the government, where they don’t have the right to challenge their detention; why is it that the public simply - to be as blunt as possible – doesn’t give a damn?

GP: We’re a pretty apathetic country politically. We’re a pretty xenophobic country. It’s always an easy populous message to wave the flag of no more immigrants, no more refugees, enough’s enough. And if you add that basic concept to terrorism then the equation’s complete. These are people that the nation were being encouraged to think no country would want within their borders; countries made to think these are dangerous people. As no one has ever talked to them I can’t see how any one can properly assess what they are. But those who are detained, or not detained, some of whom you have met, many of whom I have met, talking to them, we’re quite capable of seeing that they are people who are not a threat – far from it. If we had some ability to talk intelligently and sensibly to people who are themselves intelligent and sensible we might find that this country is simply looking in the wrong direction. And if there is to be any hope or prospect of the world becoming a safer, saner place, it has to be on a basis of comprehension and understanding. And at the present moment that is spectacularly missing. I am sure you see that far more vividly than I.

MB: When peace eventually came to Northern Ireland, they had to negotiate with those very same members they had demonised and said were the leaders of the terrorist movements, and cells and the political wings and so forth. And bizarrely before Tony Blair left, one of his lasting actions, I suppose, will be that he was the man who brought Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley together – and still it seems bizarre. Yet we’re looking at some of the people we’ve just mentioned, who are not involved and never been charged with being involved in any acts of terrorism in this country - they are clearly in some cases dissidents from their countries, because that’s how they and why they sought political asylum here. But the government makes it look as if these people are not only part of the problem, but they are the problem. But based on the Northern Ireland example, are they not really part of the solution?

GP: I would have thought that any sane intelligent person could comprehend that, but I think it’s not just talking to the people themselves and finding out that they are not as painted, that’s one thing. But the second aspect that’s missing is that what those people are representative of; as you say, they are dissidents, opposed to the regimes from which they’ve fled – no doubt about it, and justifiably so. We’re talking about regimes that torture people, that kill people, that commit genocide, where hundreds of thousands of people are disappeared, countries that are recipients and agents of the American rendition program. Those are the regimes we’re talking about. And one of the men who is relied upon significantly as a focus of the legislation, what did he do to attract the condemnation of his country, Jordan? He protested against the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. He was the voice in Jordan that said Jordan should not have supported to Saddam Hussein, as it did. And for that he was tortured and for that he was perceived as a dissident and fled. Now it seems to me that there is a wilful and deliberate unethical foreign policy here, in that for our own economic and strategic reasons, we embrace these torturing regimes, and therefore we are in the position where those regimes, complain, as they have vociferously, that their dissidents are here; we then move against them in the name of the War on Terror. But to achieve a world order that is just, we cannot forever uphold those regimes, we cannot forever support them. We fail to understand that the world conflicts that are the most insoluble must be solved and they become solved by some form of comprehension. We are just slavishly following a path of incomprehension, and these men who are here are simply part and parcel of that incomprehension.

MB: A great number of the men have been detained under these anti terror legislation measures or been put under these control orders are actually from Libya. And I think that’s an important case in point, because it demonstrates how many of these Libyan men were given asylum readily by the United Kingdom over the past couple of decades; and then all of a sudden, after the War on Terror an agreement is made between Gaddafi’s Libya, who was a pariah for the last thirty to forty years, and now all of a sudden has become a relatively friendly between the United Kingdom and the United States of America. It’s nothing to do with justice. It’s all to do with interests. How does one explain that, as somebody who lives under a control order regime, for example, when everybody he knows, everybody he deals with on a day to day basis he has to inform that I’m under this control order regime and therefore the warning lights come on? How can he explain that interests have changed, I have remained the same, I’ve never changed at all? Can he do that at all?

GP: There is an element in going through the motions of legal representation before SIAC, before the administrative court of control orders, where all of it seems so nonsensical. You’re talking about whether there should be a boundary drawn around a premises in Leicester that allow a Libyan dissident to go to one gym or another gym. It’s all completely barking mad. We’re talking about young men, or once young men, who, in anybody’s view, courageously stood up to this outrageous tyrant, who is also insane – Gaddafi – who stood up, who protested, who said this regime should not continue. And now their lives are to be conducted with geographical lines drawn around. They are not a threat to national security. It is mad to assess them with this. And yet we’re so far down the road of the rubber stamp from internment being applied to control orders, being applied to deportation, that there’s no longer any capacity for anyone to stand up and say the Emperor has no clothes on - at all.

MB: Yes, that’s true. One of the other things that came out, after the September 11^th attacks, in the legislation in the United Kingdom, is this fast track or supposed fast track extradition treaty with the United States of America which is non reciprocal. It has caused great consternation amongst the Muslim community in the case of Babar Ahmad and others. Is there any merit in this at all? Is there any merit, as far as the Americans are concerned? Is there is a real case, that somebody can somehow after all of these years, will a person like Babar Ahmad, or Haroon, or any of the other guys that are under extradition, will they ever be able to rightfully defend themselves if that ever transpires, if they are ever extradited?

GP: They are not meant to be able to properly defend themselves. What they will face when they go there is being detained in isolation, under special measures, imposed on them pre-trial, which will pretty much break any strong human being. If they’re convicted, they will probably spend the rest of their natural lives, in identical situations, virtual isolation in a Supermax prison. The evidence against them will be constructed from corrosive methodology in which witnesses for the prosecution are encouraged to become witnesses by threats; if you don’t do this, you will be made an enemy combatant and locked up in Guantanamo, or in a military brig; or yourself get life imprisonment without parole. The prospects are horrific and the men here fighting extradition know it. The only advantage, slight advantage, is that this greedy American extension of its jurisdiction has come to embrace the banking community here and therefore bankers are getting sent. British aerospace employees are being questioned now because we in this country stopped a prosecution for corrupt payments to Saudi Arabia by British aerospace. That is now becoming an area of interest for American prosecution. There is going to be an awful lot of squealing going on if our upper echelons of business are vulnerable to American prosecution. But the argument is the same: if there is a proper prosecution to be brought the natural forum should be the country in which the person lives and from which the evidence is gained. In the case of Babar Ahmad, that will be here. The man was running a website, with a collective of people of Islamic interests, and simply because the service provider was arbitrarily based in Connecticut his extradition is now sought for trial in Connecticut.

MB: That’s his only link to the United States.

GP: He’s never been to Connecticut. The whole of the readership of Azzam.com, which was the website, was cyberspace, worldwide, anyone could have a look. But it’s Connecticut that’s after him. But it’s this appetite, this same appetite that kidnapped you and took you to Guantanamo; America uber-alles, America the Superpower, America has the right and the ability to make everyone subject to it.

MB: Yes, often I say I’ve never been to America – America came to me.

GP: It did.

MB: Through extraordinary rendition. Babar has never been to Connecticut but he may be sent there through extradition, which almost sounds like extraordinary rendition. What is the prospect for all of these people, all these people detained under these measures? The common denominator of course is that they are detained without charge or trial. And even people who have been charged or convicted of crimes, today we can see for example someone can be convicted of writing poetry, convicted of downloading something from the internet – that’s a significant change from the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Is there any precedent for that sort of thing that you’ve ever seen before? Thought crimes?

GP: There were aspects of that in a way. Look, the IRA was a military organisation carrying out military campaigns, setting off bombs, murders, kidnaps. You could know what was being done. You could arrest, you could prosecute for substantive offences. There was a subtext as well that attempted to be censorship which was pretty spectacular failure, with broadcasting ban, ludicrous. But it was seen as ludicrous and in a way the Nationalist community gained some strength from that. This is more worrying because it’s so confusing, it’s so inscrutable, it’s going backwards. I know when you came back from Guantanamo, and we were talking about the fact people were being interned and what for. Well, insofar as they knew it was because they supported Chechen resistance. And you commented, ‘Oh, has that become a crime since I’ve been gone?’ Well, the answer is it never was a crime, it isn’t a crime but it is somehow being devolved into being a crime, in the sense it’s terrorism now. Self defence or self determination has been twisted into being terrorism, by somehow attaching liberation struggles through expanding definitions into something that is criminalised. And that is utter confusion. If one was a lawyer and someone came to you and said, is it a crime for me to support a resistance struggle. You would say, no, the United Nations Declaration of Independence tells you that you can. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights tells you that it’s appropriate to overthrow a tyrant as a last resort, it’s appropriate to support an entity that is able to claim self determination. That’s all gone by the board definition of terrorism that now says all of that is a crime. Any attempt to overthrow any government anywhere in the world is now terrorism, and therefore it’s all a political decision on the part of our government as to what it will go after and what it won’t. And who can know where they stand? And people go to lawyers and say if I publish this book, if I put up this website, is it legal or not? He will say in theory it’s legal, but in practice it well could be a crime, and so there is no certainty. And people, there are many people in prison now who haven’t a clue why they are there, absolutely no idea; and there are some young people convicted who do not know, do not understand why they’ve been convicted. They’ve searched the internet, they’ve looked at things, they’ve left a trace on their computer and suddenly that’s a crime.

MB: It sounds to somebody who hadn’t, wouldn’t have heard of these things before, an outsider coming to the United Kingdom, who would have heard of these things, quite bizarre, that Britain has changed. It sounds like what the Archbishop of York recently said that Britain is becoming a police state in some ways.

A lot of the people who have been charged with crimes I’ve tried to compare them with some of the former IRA prisoners I’ve met, and one of the things they’ve said was that at least in our time - and I’m talking about the people who were convicted, who openly said that they were involved a part of the Nationalist struggle - they said at least in our time we were convicted for things that we did, or planned to do, or tried to do, or wanted to do, or admitted to do. One of them said it seems now people are amongst he Muslim Community are being convicted for just thinking. And I find that quite stark for him to say that, as that’s what many people feel like in the Muslim community; and it’s one of the reasons why a lot of people in the Muslim community are afraid to advocate on the community’s behalf in the way that the Nationalist community had done, though there were completely different goals, and aims and objectives. But there is this constant, recurrent statement that’s said to people like me or anybody who’s ever been detained anywhere, that you don’t have to be Muslim or anything, it’s just something that people intrinsically believe, that the state can’t be wrong; therefore, if you’ve been detained, if you’ve been questioned, if you’ve been arrested, if you’ve been a suspect, there’s no smoke without fire, you must have been doing something. How does one counter that argument, as it’s something that remains with you even if you’ve been exonerated? You campaigned for the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six who were eventually released, convictions were not stayed, but even they have to carry the stigma of well, the state couldn’t have got it wrong. How can one explain to ordinary people that the state not only can get it wrong but often gets it wrong?

GP: I think one of the things that you do, has great value. You go round talking to an extraordinary range of people and a significant percentage of that range probably wouldn’t have encountered you in your ordinary course of events but because of this accident of fate you are breaking a number of preconceptions for those people. But you can’t go round the whole country; you won’t manage to do that.

MB: I’ve had a pretty good go of it.

GP: You’ve had a good go. Middle England - you’ve done very well. But a lot of it is lack of any opportunity to comprehend. You’ve certainly see now a great deal of comment about prisons, and about prisoners being radicalised and a lot of nonsense about Muslims in prison. But there is an extraordinary misapprehension. If young men and young women are turning to faith and are learning about a new religion or learning more about their religion, and that religion is Islam, it seems incredible that there is no recognition that this is an amazing wonderful thing. That’s quite extraordinary in this secular age in which we live; that there are young people - that’s quite the extraordinary thing - a new generation, new generations coming to faith. Frankly, prisons should be incredibly happy that of the prison population there is not only faith but there is an abstention from drugs, from alcohol, from violence, and all that goes with being devout. Instead of that, it’s all being perceived as dangerous, dangerous radicalisation, and prisoners being broken up, one from another, lest they contaminate one another by encouraging faith. Now if we’ve got to that, it’s an extraordinary stage of our thinking and our history, and we certainly now suddenly see in relation to bail, or control orders, people are being moved from areas where there is a Muslim community. It’s very, very, very close to a kind of ethnic, religious cleansing. I find it quite extraordinary.

MB: And deliberate.

GP: Yes, and conscious, and deliberate. But yet how can we be in this, even if it’s a secular age that we’re in - and it is; in terms of what used to be a homogenous fairly cohesive Christian community – it isn’t that any more. But have we now moved to an absolutely medieval frame of mind where we see the embracing of a religion as sinister. It seems to me that is very close to where we are; in which case we have torn up all our history. We have torn up all of our moves towards tolerance, all of our moves towards the right to individual respect for religion, and freedom of thought – it’s all gone, if that’s where we are.

MB: There is something in the press daily about just what you’ve said, about the demonisation of Muslims - and I know a lot of people who simply don’t want to turn on the television or read the newspapers as they are afraid of hearing the next sensational anti-Muslim story. People have termed it Islamophobia, and they can term it whatever they like – but is that an extension of racism, or is it something completely new? Is it something that’s a latent fear of something that has existed for a long time, a fear of Islam, the clash of civilisations, the fear that Islam will engulf the West in the way that it was or supposed to have been doing, or attempted to do in the Middle Ages? Can it be that? Can people be so afraid of something from hundreds and hundreds of years ago?

GP: It’s very hard to disentangle it as it’s all been stuck together with the glue of terror, and you can’t disentangle that. The War on Terror is the war on Islam. It’s impossible in terms of public understanding to wind it back, however much there is a rational debate about if people commit acts of terror, they’re to be seen as doing that. If people are of a faith, they’re to be seen as that. It’s become completely moulded together in a public consciousness. I’ve no idea how anyone can begin to disentangle that other than knowing, knowing people; because those of us who’ve had the rare, unusual luck of knowing many people of a different faith, in the Muslim community. Familiarity becomes normality and normality comes to the point where actually that’s how everyone should be. And you see family life, you see tolerance, you see broadmindedness, you see humour in ways that you might not have seen a decade before you had that experience. But how do you transpose that to the whole of society? I don’t know.

MB: Yes, sometimes I wish, when I sit and talk to some of the people who’ve been accused of being some of the world’s greatest terrorists, I really wished they could be a fly on the wall or people could see what we’re talking about, listen to what we’re talking about, and be surprised about what we are talking about and what our attitudes are.

GP: I agree completely. We’ve all had our preconceptions.

MB: Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why they won’t allow phone tap evidence into court.

GP: They’d hear a lot of talk about, surprisingly about King Lear or Ernest Hemingway or Harry Potter.

MB: That’s right, amazing, they certainly would. You have earned the title ‘al-Umm’ from some people.

GP: I know what ‘Umm’ means.

MB: ‘Al Umm’ of course means ‘the Mother’ and it’s not a title that’s easily given in the Arab world.

GP: I thought anyone could have it who had a son – which I do.

MB: Of course, but you’re not the real mother of these men but you are regarded as a motherly figure. That’s a great honour, I think that’s been bestowed by these men who regard you with the respect of ‘the mother’. In the Arabic language, ‘Al-Umm’ sometimes refers to the greatest, or the pinnacle of something. What is it you feel on a personal level towards the men that you defend and campaign for?

GP: I thought ‘Al Umm’ was simply a generational, recognition of age. I understand that - the feeling of family; maybe this experience has gone on too long, sufficiently long for us all to know each other very well. When you’ve known people for a long time, and represented people for a long time, you come to know them very well, and
the friendships you make are an extraordinary privilege that you know people in ways you would never have known them, probably in ordinary life. I know that the people I represent fiercely criticise me and quite rightly, but knowing them as well as I do and their position, and their thoughts, and where they stand on relevant issues, that I don’t sufficiently argue their case publicly. I know – and they’re right. And so I regret that I am not a sufficient witness to what I know. What I know is that they are people highly intelligent, very interesting, very thoughtful, who have a range of and a complexity of views that would be of great use to society if they could know them too. And the thought that these men are stigmatised and written off as a threat to national security is simply not right – it’s not right and I know it and I regret that I don’t sufficiently often say it.

MB: Well, the artwork of some of these men is featured in the exhibition and perhaps people can come to know them – the men – through the artwork that they’ve produced. And one of the ideas I had when visited several museums in Northern Ireland, particularly those that displayed artwork produced by prisoners in the Maze and Long Kesh [prisons] and so forth gave me an idea to have prisoners in this period – the Muslim prisoners – be able to display themselves, or display their own artwork and let people see what a father produces for his daughter; what a husband produces for his wife; what a son produces for his mother and what a person produces for his community, in the only way that he can express himself because there’s not much else that he’s able to channel his expressions through. That is, I think, the term people would use often is to ‘humanise’ the characters, but they are already humans, and it’s simply them displaying works that channel some of their work. One of the people or several have produced various mosques. I remember looking recently at just one of them. It gives me these ideas of – just looking at the design – the Golden Age of Islam in Spain, when the nations and the great faiths of the worlds - Christianity, Islam and Judaism - came together and produced this amazing society and it was so advanced that the whole of Europe itself marvelled at it. And when I looked at the art designs and work by these men, I thought to myself, perhaps this is a way in which people and recognise the good that these men have, that is potentially available to them if they were simply were to reach out to it and able to grasp it.

GP: I think probably the most extraordinary piece of Islamic art that you’re probably referring to, that the man who made that, he said that the time that they will recognise me in this country is when I’m Minister for Oil in Algeria!

MB: That’s probably true. I remember there was a book that I was given by the MI5 in Guantanamo Bay called "The English: A Portrait of the People", by Jeremy Paxman. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the MI5 had come all the way to Guantanamo to deposit this book; they had to go and clear through US military censorship. One of the things I read in there was Lord Palmerston’s statement, in 1852. He said that, "We, the British people, have no perpetual friends and we have no perpetual enemies; only our interests are perpetual." And that just seems to be as true today as it was in 1852.

For a DVD of this discussion, please contact RCPB(ML) or email elpeaceandjustice@yahoo.co.uk.

Living under a Control Order

By IRR (Institute of Race Relations) News Team, June 26, 2008

Below, we reproduce the speech made by Cerie Bullivant* on living under control orders at the launch of 'Captivated: Art of the Interned'.

When I was first asked to do this event, I thought it's the least I can do to raise awareness of those untold stories of persecution in the name of the "War on Terror". People held in our harshest prisons for months or even years with little or no evidence against them. Trapped within an ongoing legal nightmare that is designed, so that it’s almost impossible to prove one's innocence; caught within oppressive legal anomalies, such as SIAC and Control Orders, which ruin the lives of their victims leaving them lost and helpless, seeing no end to their ordeal, often resulting in mental illnesses and other long-term problems. These terribly punitive measures affect not only those named in court and held in prison, but also their families - their wives, children and parents, whose daily lives must bear the burden of these practical infringements as well as, and less obviously, the isolation and alienation from within their own community.

You may be thinking that this sounds a little melodramatic, but I say this as someone who has been through the Control Order system, as someone who has had the last two years of my life dismantled by these very laws. For me this all began with the decision to go to Syria and learn Arabic. I had hoped to study in Damascus and work with the underprivileged children, orphans and the needy. To this end I had studied TEFL [Teaching English as a Foreign Language] and had footballs and toys in my suitcase. However, it was not to be, as the security services "assessed'' that I had planned to go on to Iraq to fight alongside the insurgency. To this day, neither I, nor my solicitors know fully why this accusation was made and what the so-called evidence was behind the allegation. We have seen bits and pieces - crumbs of information. Yet the prosecution admitted that this information was not the basis of their case. That was and still is secret evidence. Nevertheless, shortly after my planned trip was stopped, I was placed under a Control Order which forced certain conditions on me which, if breached, would be a criminal offence, liable to up to five years in prison. At the beginning my conditions were: to sign in everyday between 9am and 11am at a local police station; to allow police searches of my property at any time; forced residence at a single address. I was barred from any port or airport, including international train stations, and I had to surrender my passport.

Later, much harsher conditions were, added including curfews, electronic tagging and phone checks upon entering and leaving my home. Yet my conditions were still amongst the most relaxed. The majority of Control Orders require authorisation of visitors to the residence by the Home Office, and include a ban on accessing the internet and even owning a mobile phone. What makes these orders so useful to the government is that while the conditions do not seem overburdening, they affect and dominate every sphere of your life. For my part, the order was always on my mind, be it worrying that I might be arrested for being a few minutes late or waking up in a panic in the morning thinking that the police were at the door.

When I stood trial [for breaching the conditions of the Control Order] there were two counts regarding a stay with my mother while she was ill - suddenly staying with my mum was a terrorism offence! This is typical of the petty way in which the Home Office would approach every decision, like forcing me to sign at a station that was farther from my home and awkward to reach and then arresting me for being a few minutes late. It was these constant worries and pressures that led to me suffering from severe reactive depression as a direct result of the control order. This was diagnosed by three doctors one of whom was Home Office appointed, and it was these extreme conditions that led to my absconding. The order had made living any kind of ordinary life impossible; it had, and still has, stopped me from pursuing a career in nursing. I could not maintain a relationship with my then wife due to the stresses from the order and intrusions from police, and even my mother's health became much worse as a result of the stress from the order.

The decision to abscond was born of the immense pressure placed on me by the Home Office and not knowing why I was on the order and not seeing any way to defend myself with no evidence levelled against me. It was a decision born in a single moment after a year's torment and one that led to me spending six months in Belmarsh prison upon my voluntary return. Prison is tough at the best of times, let alone when you are held with no evidence and accused of being involved in terrorism. In prison, it is the small things that get you through the days - a letter from a friend or a visit from a family member, the support of those held in similar situations. Yet in Belmarsh there [appears to be] a two tier system of rules - one for the Muslim prisoners and another for the rest of the population. Other prisoners would congregate five or six to a cell chatting and playing cards but when, in Ramadan, I was seen praying in my cell with one other inmate we were severely reprimanded and lost our social time for that day. I could go on. Being locked up at night with serious criminals when your crime is not even known to you, when all your life you have tried to be the best person that you could be, is horrifying. I was locked up with drug dealers and even two people standing trial for double murder, yet I was seen as more dangerous, more subversive.

I was preparing to stand trial for a terrorism offence in which I would not be allowed to question the rights and wrongs, where I could potentially be convicted as a terrorist with absolutely no evidence of any such involvement. All the jury would be asked was: did I breach any condition of my order. It is only by the will of God and the sterling work of my brilliant legal team that justice was upheld, and a jury of my peers found that, given the stresses I was under, absconding was legitimate and reasonable. In fact, after that verdict, I was immediately put on a much more restrictive Control Order. I wasn't even allowed to walk out of the Old Bailey a free man. Within a month of being found not guilty, I had my day at the High Court where, after we were excluded from more than half of the proceedings, the judge accepted that there were no reasonable grounds for suspecting my involvement in terrorism. I say again, there were no reasonable grounds for suspicion, with the burden of proof so low and being allowed secret evidence there was still no reasonable grounds for any suspicion. For two years my life had been ruined. I'm still dealing with the after effects of this whole fiasco. Because of biased media coverage, very few people are even aware I was cleared the police are still being vindictive, and I still have difficulties with my health.

I may have managed to prove my innocence, yet there are many more people still going though these impossibly unfair systems. These are the people that need our help, our support - that's you, me, and everybody here; don't allow yourself to be disempowered. To demonise any group within society has never been conducive to resolving disputes. Fear only begets fear. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said in an interview that he felt Britain was in a very punitive state of mind at the moment. I couldn't agree more and nowhere, is it more true than in the new anti-terror legislation, especially in light of last weeks vote on 42-day detention. However, I feel that rather than fighting terrorism, this approach to justice is far more likely to alienate young Muslims. Thank you for your time!

* Cerie Bullivant, a convert to Islam, was placed under a control order in 2006 and in May 2007 absconded in a 'moment of madness' and after four weeks on the run handed himself in to police and was detained at Belmarsh maximum secure prison. He was tried for breaching his Control Order at the Old Bailey and cleared, another more restrictive Control Order followed. However, in January 2008 a High Court judge quashed the Control Order, ruling that the Home Secretary no longer had reasonable grounds for suspicion.

Contempt for the Rule of Law

Contempt for the Rule of Law

Was It Like This for the Irish?

Interview with Gareth Peirce Moazzam Begg

Living under a Control Order

Interview with Gareth Peirce
Moazzam Begg