Watch your mouth

Aug 12th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

In the wake of the London Tube and bus bombings, Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, thinks that European human-rights laws prevent Britain from dealing with supporters of terrorism. But the real obstacles lie closer to home

WHAT makes a suicide-bomber? Long before the attacks that killed 52 people in London on July 7th, Britain’s security services had a clear pattern in their minds. A man who may drink beer, play football, chase girls and lead a life that is indistinguishable from those of most other young Britons starts looking around for something less ordinary. At that point, he comes under the influence of a charismatic imam, who rails against the ill-treatment of Muslims around the world and suggests a straightforward route to self-fulfilment. He may eventually board a plane to Israel or a train to London, with the intention of killing as many civilians as possible.

Trying to prevent rebellious impulses from taking hold is a difficult thing for a parent to do, let alone a government. So Britain’s Labour government is looking instead at clamping down on the people who inspire terrorists. Many of these people, it thinks, are foreign-born, and therefore the state ought to be able to deal with them, without the liberties that British citizens enjoy getting in the way. That was the impulse behind a plan launched by Charles Clarke, the home secretary (interior minister), to define what counts as unacceptable behaviour by Muslims in Britain. It was also behind the 12-point plan that Tony Blair, the prime minister, announced on August 5th, while Mr Clarke was on holiday, before he too headed for the beach.

Mr Blair’s agenda is wide-ranging and vague. It includes speeding up the deportation of foreign-born radicals, extending a proposed ban on glorifying terrorism to cover people who justify or glorify terrorism anywhere in the world, holding pre-trial hearings to allow sensitive evidence to be admitted (these have already been dubbed “secret courts”), banning some Islamist organisations from Britain, and closing troublesome places of worship.

That was more than enough to frighten libertarians. “Just having undergraduate debates about whether it is ever right to take up arms could get you into this,” reckons Shami Chakrabati, director of Liberty, a pressure group. But then the attorney-general raised the temperature further, by letting it be known that radical imams might be charged with treason, an ancient crime in English law that dates back to an era when having sex with the king’s consort was a capital offence.

Part of this is politicking. “Everything the prime minister said will go down well in Conservative associations,” notes Edward Garnier, the shadow home affairs minister with the main opposition Conservative Party. The treason idea was quickly scotched, though not before it had inspired some headlines.

But Mr Blair’s insistence that “the rules of the game are changing”, plus a nagging suspicion that Britain’s legal system might be less well equipped to deal with Islamic extremism than those of other European countries, has left the government looking for ways to make Britain a bit more like France. The French have both experience of Islamic extremism and a reputation for toughness—they have long been exasperated by what they see as excessive tolerance of radical Islam in Britain. The French government has promised a new anti-terrorism law by the end of this month, designed to strengthen the hardline approach it has adopted in recent years.

According to Mr Blair, the first step towards a tougher approach in Britain is to find a way around the 1998 Human Rights Act. That’s odd, because the other members of the Council of Europe are also bound by the European Convention on Human Rights (which British civil servants played a big part in drafting). Though Mr Blair says that Article 3, which prohibits torture, makes it difficult to deport undesirables to countries where their toenails might be pulled out, this has not prevented other signatories to the convention from doing so. So what is Britain’s problem?

First, though the convention is the same everywhere, Britain’s adversarial legal system means that it works differently there. Defendants typically have the right to appeal at several stages of the legal process. That makes appeals against extradition protracted and expensive. In 2001, it took an average of eight months to extradite someone to Britain, but 18 months to send someone the other way. Contested hearings cost around £125,000 ($223,000). An attempt two years ago to streamline the process has not altered its fundamentally fractious nature. In France, by contrast, deporting suspects to countries with patchy human-rights records causes little fuss. Rights of appeal are more restricted and deportees may not be able to appeal until after they have left the country, by which time it might be too late. “Often you send a fellow back to Algeria and that’s the last you hear of him,” says Clive Walker, who studies terrorism laws at Leeds University.

Second, Britain has a long tradition of sheltering firebrands, which is reflected in the law. Victorian London was an excellent place for foreign radicals to set up shop—whether they were scholarly types like Karl Marx, who plotted the overthrow of capitalism from the reading room of the British Museum, or militants like Johann Most, a German anarchist who was allowed to wander the streets despite penning a guide called “The Science of Revolutionary Warfare”. Ancient laws on free speech, a light touch from the censor and a lack of legal distinctions between citizens and non-citizens have appealed to African National Congress supporters and Islamist radicals alike. If the government really wanted to overturn this tradition, it would need extensive legislation.

A more straightforward option is to get agreements from foreign countries not to harm anyone who is extradited from Britain. It already has one such agreement with Jordan, and is seeking similar undertakings from nine other countries. On August 11th, police arrested ten foreign nationals in south-east England and the Midlands, with a view to deporting them. It will provide the first test of how judges respond to Mr Blair’s hectoring.

None of this helps much where the culprits are British-born, however. For them, the government proposes to use more control orders—a new legal device that deprives people of some liberties without actually locking them up. Mr Blair also said that the government would look at stripping naturalised Brits of their citizenship if they support terrorists. In practice that is difficult: unless someone has dual nationality, revoking their citizenship means making them stateless.

Some have suggested that the flurry of announcements, coupled with a lack of detail on how they might work, is really aimed at scaring the firebrands away. If so, it might be working. Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born imam who could be caught out by the new laws, recently left Britain to visit his mother. He told reporters he would be coming back (not to foment terror, but to have a heart operation on the state-run National Health Service). On August 12th, however—following Mr Mohammed's brief detention by the Lebanese authorities—the British government said that he would be barred from returning as his presence was not “conducive to the public good”.

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