Practise what you preach

Terror suspects in Britain

Jan 27th 2005
From The Economist print edition

The British government should stop punishing terror suspects without trying them

BE CAREFUL what you wish for. After months of demanding (publicly, at least) that the Americans release the remaining four British prisoners from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, the British government has got its way and the detainees have been sent back. So guilty were the men that the police released them immediately. The detainees' arrival compounds the embarrassment caused by the Law Lords, when they ruled last month that the indefinite detention of foreign terror suspects was illegal because it was “disproportionate” to the supposed threat and discriminated against foreigners. Sixteen have been held without trial, mainly in Belmarsh high security prison, for up to three years. Eleven remain.

Charles Clarke, the new home secretary, faces the familiar post-September 11th dilemma. Should he accept that, since the evidence against some terror suspects would not stand up or would be inadmissible in a normal court of law, they must be released? Or does terrorism pose such a danger that the criminal justice system's usual safeguards should be dispensed with? Mr Clarke's instinct is to take the latter path. His instinct is wrong.

They haven't gone away

Not that the government's desire to keep tabs on these people is frivolous. The fact that there has not been a big terrorist attack against the West since the one in Madrid last March does not mean that the threat has gone away: as Osama bin Laden's reference to the wrongs done to Muslims in 8th-century Andalucia shows, Islamist terrorists work on a longer time-scale than most people. Anyway, the absence of successful attacks does not prove any lack of terrorist effort. Mr Clarke will have had frightening briefings from the security services about several big plots since September 11th aimed at killing Britons which, they say, have been averted.

Some of those alleged plotters are being, or are soon to be, tried. But, says the government, in some cases the evidence has been gathered in ways that makes it inadmissible in court, and in other cases, although the security services are sure that the suspects are involved in worrying activities, there is not enough evidence to make a convincing case against them, or the evidence is so sensitive that it cannot be presented in open court. That's why it has been trying to find its way around the safeguards in the criminal justice system designed to protect all defendants' rights.

Now that the Law Lords have ruled out detaining foreign suspects indefinitely without trial, the government is exploring other ways of restricting their liberty. On January 26th, the day after the Guantánamo four arrived back, Mr Clarke announced plans to keep terrorist suspects under house arrest—a power that could be used on Britons as well as foreigners—to avoid falling foul of the Lords' ruling.

Keeping suspects under house arrest without trial is better than imprisoning them in high-security jails without trial, but it is still unacceptable. Nobody should be locked up indefinitely, inside their home or out of it, when they have not faced a trial in which they have been given the opportunity to defend themselves publicly. Otherwise, any of us could be.

There are certainly weaknesses in the criminal justice system that hamper the fight against terrorism. In Britain, for instance—unlike in many rich-world countries—evidence collected by tapping people's phones is inadmissible in court. That restriction was designed to protect the security services' intelligence sources; but it is now widely believed, by both spies and policemen, to do more harm than good. Strengthening the prosecution's hand, however, is a long way from imprisoning people who have not been tried.

Tony Blair says he wants to make the world a better place. Yet in its treatment of terrorist suspects, Britain, like America, has undermined the values it purports to uphold. A little more commitment to those values at home might mean a little less scepticism about British and American motives abroad.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.