By Jamie Barton
This weeks ongoing appeal by foreign terror suspects in the UK, who are being held without charge or trial, has highlighted how 9/11 and preoccupation with ever elusive security has allowed Western governments to erode civil liberties, human rights and streamline legal systems to detain and fastrack those with suspect loyalties.
All of the 15 foreign nationals held in Britain, currently appealing against being detained, are suspected of being threats to National Security or of having links to international terror groups and have been caged under the tough Anti-Terror and Security Act introduced by British Home Secretary David Blunkett as a knee jerk reaction to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre.
Britain actually opted out of the European Conventions Human Rights Article 5, which grants protection against detention without trial, to produce this legislation in late 2001.
Suspects in the UK, including Palestinian cleric Abu Qatadah who was arrested in October 2002, can be locked up indefinitely under new Anti-Terrorism measures and some of these foreign nationals have been incarcerated without charge or trial at maximum security prisons such as HMP Belmarsh for as long as 18 months.
Their appeals are to be conducted in private for reasons relating to ‘intelligence’ and the new watchwords of the time, ‘national security’.
The Court of Appeal has even ruled already that the government is legally allowed to detain these men, after an ‘in depth’ review in February concluded that the criteria for caging them were met, while lawyers representing the men have called the evidence against them ‘fragmentary, incomplete and extremely tenuous.’
This is concurrent with the case of the family of failed British suicide bomber Omar Sharif whose body was recently found on a Tel Aviv beach. His wife, Tahira Tabassum, brother Zahid, and sister Parveef are charged with failing to disclose information about terrorism abroad.
While the other family members have been bailed until a date in August is fixed, sister Parveef has been remanded in custody accused of ‘aiding, abetting, counselling and procuring acts of terror outside the UK’ loosely based on e-mail records - scapegoats to appease the Israelis baying for some kind of justice after the suicide attack at a Tel Aviv beach bar by another UK citizen Asif Hanif.
In Britain today, government departments and agencies can pass sensitive information to the police, while communications companies are allowed to keep and pass on records of phone calls or e-mails. These anti-crime and terrorism measures and electronic eavesdropping are to be reviewed in two years time it has been announced.
But a decisive shift has now already taken place: ‘counterterrorism’ has moved from the sphere of law enforcement to that of national security.
The difference is momentous: law enforcement operates after the fact of a crime, gathering evidence and testimony within the tight constraints of the law. National security tries to anticipate events before they happen and uses all kinds of extreme preventative methods.
A new concept in Britain, the U.S and around the world is the notion of ‘limited democracy’ – in country after country legal protection for citizens is under threat and the precarious rights of foreigners and refugees is also at risk.
This week, the U.S announced plans to implement a system to where foreign visitors to the U.S travelling on visas will be fingerprinted and photographed from next year in a bid to monitor foreign visitor movements in the country.
In India, police can now hold suspects without charge for three months. In South Africa, anti-terrorism legislation criminalises strikes, while in Spain repressive legislation that bans political parties that promote a ‘culture of civil confrontation’ has been enforced. In Italy, the security services are authorized to break the law for the purposes of national security.
Western government is getting itself involved in areas of life that before September 11th, people thought it should avoid – and many still do confirm to these ideas of civil liberty and individual privacy and rights. With enough imagination, everything from the water supply to internet access can be seen as areas of potential terrorist activity. A few European governments have announced plans that they intended to try and regulate the Internet in some fashion.
It is now not unlikely that governments are going to set about doing just this and find a way to monitor Internet communication. In China, for example, 33 people are being held for discussing politics online and the Communist rulers there have ordered a crackdown to quash efforts to use the Web to spread criticism of Communist rule and demands for political reform.
These are repressive policies, which are expected in a nation under authoritarian Communist rule such as China but which are being echoed by seemingly democratically elected administrations around the world. The renewed power of government to suppress is an enduring ramification of 9/11; the ‘state’ has returned with an iron fist and for the oldest reason in the book: the provision of national security.
It is this national security that has become its own police, judge, jury and executioner – the appeal not being towards law but to raison d’etat.
Jamie Barton is a UK-based journalist, specialising in foreign affairs, the Middle East and global terrorism He currently contributes to several Middle-East online publications and UK newspapers.
