The WEEK
ending 18 November 2001
Right across the Western world governments are hurriedly introducing
repressive legislation undermining free speech, freedom of association,
liberty of the person, privacy of information and due process of law.
GLOBAL REPRESSION
This is just some of the 'highlights' from selected countries:
USA
- Military courts for terrorist suspects
The USA Patriot Act
- Administrative detention of non-citizens committing offences
(including violation of visa conditions if they cannot be deported)
- Reduction of judicial supervision over official surveillance of
telephone and internet communication
- Criminalisation of membership and support for 'terrorist groups'-
Vague legal definition of terrorist group to include any 'violent
activity' including by domestic groups
- Secret surveillance of private financial information with no judicial
scrutiny
- Removal of almost all restrictions on police access to information on
students
Britain
Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Bill
- Indefinite detention of foreign 'suspected terrorists'
- Law against incitement of religious hatred
- Forcible photographing of arrested suspects
- Police power to demand removal of clothing that obscures identity
- Expansion of jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defence police
- Unrestricted access for police to electronic and telephone
communication data for all investigations
- New offence of failure to supply police with information regarding
terrorism
- Powers to seize funds belonging to suspected terrorists
Canada
Anti-Terrorism Act
- Wide definition of terrorism including acts committed out of
jurisdiction
- Legal designation of 'terrorist groups' and criminalisation of
participation in them
- Increased police surveillance powers over electronic data
- Widening the Official Secrets Act
- New offence of failure to supply police with information regarding
terrorism
- Preventative detention of suspected terrorists
- Criminalisation of computer hacking
- New 'hate propaganda' offences
Australia
- Increased police surveillance powers over electronic and
telecommunications data
- Deployment of military against asylum seekers
- Restrictions on legal appeal rights of asylum seekers
- Offshore detention camps for asylum seekers
- Legal immunities against suit and prosecution for secret services and
political police
- Offence to identify secret service personnel
- Authorisation for intelligence services to spy on Australian citizens
overseas
Germany
- New offence of membership of foreign 'terrorist group'
- Increased police surveillance powers over electronic data
- Ending immunities enjoyed by religious groups
- Power for domestic deployment of army
NOTHING TO DO WITH SEPTEMBER 11
The new powers being taken share a pattern. In every country interior
and justice ministries insist that these new laws are needed to deal
with the 'changed threat' that terrorism represents after September 11.
This is not true anywhere, and in the case of the UK at least this claim
is deliberately misleading.
The British bill includes some powers that the government has tried to
get through parliament before without success, such as widening the
arrest powers of the Ministry of Defence police. It also includes powers
such as the unrestricted access of police to electronic communication
records, which are not restricted to investigations of terrorism. These
are simply being introduced 'under cover' of September 11.
Moreover, Home Secretary Blunkett told parliament on 15 October that
there was 'no immediate intelligence pointing to a specific threat to
the UK'. He has not changed that position. He has now told Labour MPs
that the state of emergency that he will formally announce is only a
'technical' state of emergency. 'Technical' because there has to be a
state of emergency declared to permit the government to introduce
indefinite detention of terrorist suspects under Clause 23 of the Bill
without violating the European Convention on Human Rights. The
Convention allows the government to derogate from its Article 5, which
protects the liberty of the person, only on the grounds that there is a
national emergency. Technical is one word for it, cynical would be
another, but either way the detention power is plainly unrelated to any
new terrorist threat. The Australian attorney general has also confessed
that his security apparatus has been unable to discover any terrorist
targeting of Australia, nor is it clear in what sense Canada and Germany
are facing an emergency.
CHILLING THE OPPOSITION IN EXILE
It is worth remembering that anti-terrorism laws have never been
effective against determined conspiracies, but they have always served
to repress wider political opposition. Two decades of the UK's
Prevention of Terrorism Act entirely failed to prevent the actions of
the IRA; but then the vast majority of the hundreds of Irish people
arrested and detained under its draconian provisions were never charged
with anything. Its effect was rather to intimidate political supporters
of Irish republicanism in mainland Britain.
It is in this context that the new indefinite detention power of the
British and American interior ministries should be seen. Part 4 of the
Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill allows the UK Home Secretary to
detain indefinitely any foreigner who has been refused asylum but who
cannot lawfully be deported to his country of origin because he would
face torture or execution, and so his deportation would violate Article
3 ECHR. It is enough that the Home Secretary 'suspects' that the person
is involved with terrorists or has 'links' to others whom the Home
Secretary suspects of being terrorists. This power is very wide ranging
indeed. When combined with the very broad and vague definition of
terrorism already legally enacted in the Terrorism Act 2000, the new
power means that the Home Secretary can detain indefinitely any foreign
citizen who is a critic of a regime which the British government
supports, but which routinely persecutes its political opponents.
The trend in Britain, which leads the world in this respect, is towards
the criminalisation of all unauthorised exile political activity. The
Terrorism Act already allows the Home Secretary to designate certain
organisations as terrorist groups. Under the act it is a criminal
offence to be a member of or raise funds for or assist in any way such
an organisation. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), for example, is one
of the organisations that have been proscribed under the act. Apart from
being the largest of the groups resisting decades of oppression of the
Kurds by NATO member Turkey, the PKK is the dominant organisation among
Kurdish exiles living in Britain and one of the largest political
parties in Europe.
The new offence of incitement of religious hatred is also a political
weapon. Although widely criticised as a sop to Muslim sensitivities, its
most likely initial victims will be Islamists. Muslim activists are
already facing prosecution under the UK's existing race discrimination
laws for criticising Israel.
This repressive trend appears to have gained more legal authority
following the October decision by the House of Lords in the case of
Rehman, a Muslim cleric whom the government wished to deport to India.
In this case, the UK's highest court endorsed a concept of the
'interests of national security' that includes threats towards other
states. The 'interests of national security' is now a means to suppress
the political organisation of people exiled in the West who represent no
threat to the life of the UK or to the British state.
BOTH TOO LITTLE AND TOO MUCH
The contemporary trend for repressive legislation will doubtless be used
as a weapon against political dissent from the Western order. Many
Muslims from the Middle East already languish in British jails, for
example, where they fill the cells previously occupied by Irish
prisoners. However, this is not the primary reason for the new bill's
introduction.
Devoid of moral purpose, contemporary governments can only present
themselves as the protector of people from perceived threats to their
safety. Removing a few more civil liberties backed up by a lot of drama
queenery about states of emergency is a cheap and easy means to keep up
this posturing. The new powers are pure overkill from the security point
of view; their primary purpose is to maintain the very sense of
emergency they invoke. Governments are exploiting the anxieties of
fearful populations, but they lack the confidence to mobilise their
populations in any way. Passing new repressive laws is a cowardly
substitute for taking any action in which their purported 'defence of
civilisation' might make any immediate demands upon the mass of the
people.
In this way politicians are lazily demolishing the protections from
arbitrary and despotic government which took the people of Europe and
America centuries to win. Leave aside the unrestricted police access to
electronic communications records, the duty to inform the authorities
and all the rest. The US and British governments are reintroducing
indefinite detention at the whim of the interior minister; we should not
be reassured that there is no immediate reason for using it against more
than a few people.
WHO ARE THE DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM?
Human rights lawyers are up in arms about the way that governments are
trying to limit, or even to oust completely, the judiciary from any role
in reviewing the exercise of the new powers such as detention orders or
police search of electronic data. David Blunkett has retorted that it
has always been politicians and not judges who have fought for political
freedom. Blunkett's hypocrisy is transparent, but what he says is true.
With a few honourable exceptions, the judiciary have always been
deferential to state power when it came to the civil liberties crunch
(the House of Lords decision in Rehman being only the latest example).
However since the desegregation rulings in the 1950s, the American
radicals have looked to the Supreme Court to defend the values it
thought were important. More recently the British judiciary have staked
their claim as the defender of individual rights by means of the Human
Rights Act. But taking the case for freedom into the courts and out of
electoral politics has left the Blunketts in charge of the politics and
reduced civil liberties in the public mind to a special interest
promoted by crooked lawyers.
Western governments say that they are trying to defend the freedom and
the rule of law which terrorists are trying to destroy. But introducing
indefinite detention on the grounds of executive 'suspicion' in order to
uphold the rule of law is like burning the village in order to save it.
The security clampdown exposes the claim of the West to be the defender
of freedom and civilisation as a fake.
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