Police stop-and-search powers are overused and alienating ethnic minority communities, Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell is expected to say later. The Lib Dems say nearly 167,000 people have been stopped under anti-terrorism laws, but only 40 have been convicted. In a speech at a mosque in Birmingham, Sir Menzies will say the powers are often used in an “indiscriminate” way.
Category Archives: State Oppression
Is no-one safe from Britain’s police state?
Is no-one safe from Britain’s police state?
By Tom Mellen
Morning Star, 23 March 2007
CIVIL rights campaigners and MPs warned yesterday that no-one is safe from punishment without trial after Home Secretary John Reid announced that nine British citizens are now subject to “control orders.”
This means that half of all the 18 controversial orders that are currently in force are against British citizens, rather than foreign nationals. In comparison, in February last year, just one of the 18 orders in force was against a British citizen.
Control orders are a form of house arrest under which the liberty of the recipient is severely restricted upon an order made by the Home Secretary.
In a quarterly update to MPs, Mr Reid said that two new orders have been made against British citizens – one on December 11 and another on March 10. He also admitted that a terror suspect who absconded last summer is now thought to be overseas.
Labour leadership contender John McDonnell MP said: “When control orders were introduced, we warned that this measure was a ruse to detain people without trial. Now it is escalating. If there is evidence, these people should be brought to trial. If not, they must not be subject to control orders, which undermine the fundamental priniciple of habeas corpus, a key aspect of our legal system for centuries.”
A Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) spokesman warned that Mr Reid’s announcement is a “grave warning that no-one is safe from punishment without trial and that the government is moving further towards a police state.”
MCB calls for review of terrorism laws and inquiry into causes of terrorism
“The latest figures released by the Home Office regarding arrests, charges and convictions under terrorism legislation raise serious issues of concern and indeed substantiate fears that the legislation is being used indiscriminately and disproportionately.”
Anti-terror laws: many arrested, few convicted
The Government’s campaign to tackle the “terrorist threat” was again questioned today as the Home Office released the latest statistics on individuals arrested under anti-terrorism laws. Of the 1,166 arrested in the UK since September 11 2001, only 40 have been convicted under anti-terrorism legislation. More than half of those suspected of being terrorists of one form or another have been released without any charge at all.
See also Press Association, 5 March 2007
Europe muzzles Muslim intellectuals
Several prominent Muslim intellectuals are increasingly being barred from addressing international gatherings and delivering lectures across Europe on the grounds of extremism or anti-Semitism.
“We face many hurdles while planning for our annual Bourget conference,” Lhaj Thami Breze, Chairman of the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), told IslamOnline.net. “We want to invite prominent Muslim scholars from around the world but are always confronted with a long blacklist of people we can not invite.”
The four-day Bourget conference, the biggest Muslim convention in Europe, attracted last year more than 150,000 Muslims from across the continent. “Many moderate Muslims from the East and West, including prominent European thinkers, are banned from attending,” Breze said.
He cited Swiss-based prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and his brother Hany, the director of the Islamic Center in Geneva.
Evidence against Muslim charity appears fabricated
When the Bush administration shut down the nation’s largest Muslim charity five years ago, officials of the Dallas-based foundation denied allegations it was linked to terrorists and insisted that a number of accusations were fabricated by the government. Now, attorneys for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development say the government’s own documents provide evidence of that claim.
In recent court filings, defense lawyers disclosed striking discrepancies between an official summary and the verbatim transcripts of an FBI-wiretapped conversation in 1996 involving Holy Land officials. The summary attributes inflammatory, anti-Semitic comments to Holy Land officials that are not found in a 13-page transcript of the recorded conversation. It recently was turned over to the defense by the government in an exchange of evidence.
New attack on civil liberties
New attack on civil liberties: Lord Chancellor calls for more rights to go in the name of “fighting terror”
By Louise Nousratpour
Morning Star, 15 February 2007
LEFT MPs condemned fresh government attacks on civil liberties on Wednesday after Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer called for allowing criminal suspects to be questioned even after charges have been brought against them.
Critics warned that ministers were looking for a “fail-safe” plan in case fresh attempts to increase the period under which suspects can be held to 90 days failed again in Parliament.
Lord Falconer backed measures to allow police to question suspects after they have been formally charged as a “very sensible thing to do.” And he suggested that it should not be limited to terror suspects alone.
At present, police officers are not allowed to continue asking suspects about a case once charges have been made.
Speaking after a keynote speech at a Royal United Services Institute conference on politics and terrorism, Lord Falconer hinted that forthcoming terror laws will include further encroachments on civil liberties.
Campaigners and MPs warned that the proposal was designed to ensure that, if Home Secretary John Reid’s renewed attempt to extend the maximum detention period is defeated, there will be other measures to keep suspects locked up.
An attempt to increase the maximum period from 14 to 90 days led to new Labour’s defeat in the Commons in November 2005 and resulted in a 28-days compromise being reached.
Left MP Jeremy Corbyn called the proposal “a fail-safe policy in the event of Parliament rejecting the 90-day detention without trial to ensure that the government has some other draconian measure to fall back on.”
He accused the government and Lord Falconer of “trying to deny basic natural justice and to use the unfortunate development of anti-terror legislation to make them part of normal English law.
“This flies in the face of natural law and the European convention on human rights,” warned Mr Corbyn.
A green light to shoot the innocent
The families caught up in the Forest Gate terror raids attacked an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report as a “whitewash” on Tuesday after it said that officers would not be disciplined.
The police watchdog criticised Scotland Yard’s handling of the raids in east London last June and urged the Met to apologise publicly for its “very aggressive” tactics. But the IPCC claimed that the police had been justified in carrying out the raids and that officers would not be disciplined.
The families, in a statement issued through their lawyers, said that they had been the victims of a “crime of the utmost seriousness” and had been denied justice because of the failure to investigate that crime.
Mohammed Abdul Kahar, one of two brothers arrested in the raids, attacked the report as a “whitewash.” Mr Kahar, who was shot during the raids, said that the report gave a “green light” to police to conduct anti-terror operations the way that they wanted.
Bruce Bawer and Islamophobia
“So what are Mr. Bawer’s views? He calls himself a ‘liberal’ cultural critic but his views are anything but liberal, and he is much in vogue with the ultraconservative National Review types as well as the ethno-nationalist ‘intellectuals’ in Europe where he lives….
“Bawer has his own solution to the ‘immigrant question’. He tells us his views are unfairly attacked by people who call him names ‘instead of trying to respond to irrefutable facts and arguments’. If Mr. Bawer’s arguments are indeed ‘irrefutable’ what would be the point of trying to respond to them? People who believe their opinions and arguments are ‘irrefutable’ are manifesting that very same fundamentalist mentality they claim to be opposing.
“Here is Bawer’s solution. ‘European officials’, he writes, ‘have a clear route out of this nightmare. They have armies. They have police. They have prisons. They’re in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday. They could start rescuing Europe tomorrow.’ Clearly, when you are calling out the army and advocating deportation of planeloads of people daily, there is more to it than a crackdown on violent militant Islamists. This looks like a call to a general assault on Muslim immigrants in general.
“This may also explain his sympathetic defense of the Sweden Democrats in an opinion piece he wrote for the December 8, 2006 New York Sun. This article, ‘While Sweden Slept‘ is an incontinent attack on Swedish Social Democracy. The Sweden Democrats he champions in this article are a small radical right-wing party of ethno-nationalists. It grew out of the racist ‘Keep Sweden Swedish’ movement of the 1980s. Their basic ideology is the ein Volk, ein Reich variety. One of their own leaders resigned saying the party was infested with neo-Nazis, racists and holocaust deniers. The party is opposed to immigration and if it ever got into power would no doubt take Bawer’s views on how to ‘rescue Europe’ (or at least Sweden) seriously.”
Thomas Riggins in Political Affairs, 13 February 2007
Worldwide protests greet Guantánamo anniversary
Five years of torture: worldwide protests greet Guantánamo anniversary
By Tom Mellen
Morning Star, 12 January 2007
HUMAN rights activists gathered outside the US embassy in London on Thursday as part of an international day of protest marking the fifth anniversary of the opening of the notorious Guantanamo Bay concentration camp.
Under the fluttering stars and stripes, the imperial eagle and a couple of machine-gun toting police officers, more than 500 protesters, including jumpsuited Amnesty International campaigners muzzled with masks and earmuffs, filled Grosvenor Square, graphically hammering home the daily brutality taking place in the legal black hole.
Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin said that, “if we allow Guantanamo to continue unopposed, human rights standards all over the world will be eroded.” Calling for everyone to show solidarity with those who remain languishing in the camp five years on, Mr Durkin warned that “everyone is at risk of Guantanamo-style treatment.”
In Scotland, over 40 Amnesty supporters braved driving wind and rain to protest outside the US consulate in Edinburgh, where they chained themselves together to highlight the suffering of the Guantanamo detainees.
Rallies also took place in New York, Tokyo, Rome, Madrid and Israel, while international peace activists including US “peace mum” Cindy Sheehan and the brother of British citizen Omar Deghayes marched to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay to demand its closure.
The “icon of lawlessness” has drawn criticism from lawyers and rights activists ever since the first 20 prisoners were transported there from Afghanistan in 2002.
US President George Bush was dealt a blow by the US Supreme Court in June last year, when judges ruled that the military tribunal system at the base was illegal, breaching both the Geneva conventions and US law.
In total, some 775 men have been detained, with just under half – 379 – released. Just 10 detainees have been charged, but none has gone to trial.