Smith creates ‘climate of fear’

By James Tweedie

Morning Star, 23 October 2007

HOME Secretary Jacqui Smith appeared before the Commons home affairs committee on Monday for questioning on government plans to extend detention without trial for terror suspects.

The government is considering increasing the limit the current 28-day limit to 56 days – or even to an indefinite period with judicial oversight.

It is also examining the use of phone tap and other “intercept” evidence, imposing “enhanced” sentences for non-terrorist offences committed for a terrorist purpose and broadening the definition of terrorism to include acts carried out for racial and ethnic as well as political aims.

Ms Smith told MPs that the “time is right” for extending the maximum period beyond 28 days. But she admitted that there had not yet been a case where longer than the current four-week limit has been required.

Committee chairman Keith Vaz warned that extra detention power could disproportionately affect Muslims. “The worry about this is that we then stigmatise whole communities and, in my view, that is the road to ruin,” he said.

Human rights campaign Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti also warned that Britain was heading for a state of “permament emergency”.

“The Home Secretary’s revelation that the case has not been made for extending pre-charge detention will be met with considerable surprise,” she said. “There has been so much posturing by so-called experts that few people have remembered to ask for the hard evidence before any change is made.”

Fellow campaigners Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a briefing paper on counter-terrorism measures yesterday, entitled UK: Counter the Threat or Counterproductive? HRW associate Europe and Central Asia director Benjamin Ward said: “Locking up suspects without charge for months at a time is wrong in principle and wrong in practice. It violates the basic right to liberty and risks alienating British Muslims.”

The HRW paper pointed out that less than half of those detained under counter-terrorism powers have been convicted. It says:

“Adopting powers that allow terrorism suspects – many if not most of whom would doubtless be British Muslims – to be detained without charge for months at a time would be deeply damaging to the government’s efforts to win ‘hearts and minds.’ Judicially supervised pre-charge detention without time limits would amount to the reintroduction of internment, a policy widely acknowledged to have alienated communities in Northern Ireland.”

Mr Ward noted that Counter-terrorism Minister Tony McNulty has acknowledged that “the rules of the game haven’t changed” on civil liberties. “The government is finally saying the right things about human rights and security, but the proof will be in the policy,” he said. “If the government is serious about playing by the rules, it should shelve extended pre-charge detention.”

Campaign Against Criminalising Communities spokesman Les Levidow added: “The analogy with Northern Ireland is entirely correct. That is why we have always called detention without trial internment. It’s punishment without trial. The proposals to extend pre-trial detention and introduce post-charge questioning by police are designed for political harrassment.”

“These powers have been disproportionately targeted against Muslims. Clearly, the political aim is to intimidate these communities,” Mr Levidow continued. “These powers are not needed to protect us from violence. They are part of the government’s political aims of suppressing freedom of speech and creating a climate of fear.”

No more torture in our name

By Louise Nousratpour

Morning Star, 10 October 2007

AMNESTY International UK launched a hard-hitting campaign on Monday against human rights abuses in the name of the “war on terror.” The human rights organisation called on people to make a stand against terrorism and against civil liberties being eroded by governments claiming to fight al-Qaida. The billboard and internet campaign is called Unsubscribe, after the process that internet users use to reject unwanted emails.

Speaking at a launch event in Birmingham, Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: “Unsubscribe is about rejecting the false choice between terrorism on the one hand and abuse of human rights on the other.” She stressed people’s opposition to the government’s detention without charge or trial of terror suspects under the pretext of national security. “They believe people have a right to know why they are being detained and they believe in the right to have a fair trial if someone is suspected of a serious offence,” Ms Allen added.

As part of the campaign, Amnesty has launched a powerful new two-minute drama film depicting the suffering of a hooded prisoner undergoing “stress and duress” torture by an unnamed man in plain clothes. In the film, which is called Waiting for the Guard and can be seen online at www.unsubscribe-me.org, the prisoner is seen stripped to his underwear in an underground chamber and forced to sit with his head a knee level.

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg said that the Unsubscribe film brought back unpleasant memories. “You cannot imagine that happening to anybody, let alone yourself,” said Mr Begg, who was held without charge for two years at the notorious US prison camp. “The way that I tried almost to tackle it was to say that it didn’t happen to me, it happened to someone else.”

Mr Begg said that worse abuses of human rights go on in “ghost” detention camps, referring to widely reported secret CIA “torture camps” that are scattered across the world. “These kinds of things continue to exist. Perhaps they don’t happen at Guantanamo any more, but there are other sites that people have to pass through,” he warned. “By the time I was sent to Guantanamo, I was looking forward to it.”

National Union of Students president Gemma Tumulty said that the campaign would give millions of students in Britain a voice to their “instinctive feeling that something has been going badly wrong in the ‘war on terror’.”

Amnesty will also display a series of hard-hitting billboard posters across the country. They will reproduce some of the most infamous images of human rights abuses from the “war on terror”. The images include an Abu Ghraib prisoner in Iraq being attacked by a dog and a Guantanamo Bay detainee being abused. The posters all bear the message Unsubscribe and will be displayed during October on the streets of Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester.