Posted on 01/26/2005 8:58:45 AM PST by ijcr
Detention of foreign terror suspects without trial will be replaced with a range of new powers including house arrest, Charles Clarke has proposed.
The home secretary's planned "control orders" would also cover UK citizens. They follow a law lords ruling that the detentions broke human rights laws.
Twelve men are currently held under the existing powers, introduced after the US terror attacks on 11 September 2001.
Deals are already being sought to deport some of the men.
Most of the detainees are in Belmarsh Prison in London.
Mr Clarke said efforts would continue to deport them to their countries of origin Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan without them facing torture or death.
British citizens
The proposed changes would mean the home secretary could order British citizens to be held under house arrest without putting them on trial.
They, or foreign suspects who cannot be deported, could also face lesser measures such as tagging, curfews, restrictions on their movements or limits on their use of telephones and the internet.
British citizens are being included in the changes after the law lords said the current powers were discriminatory because they could only be used on foreign suspects.
Mr Clarke also said intelligence reports showed some British nationals were now playing a more significant role in terror threats.
Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith condemned the plans as a "further abuse of human rights in Britain".
Mr Clarke said prosecutions were the government's first preference and promised the powers would only be used in "serious" cases, with independent scrutiny from judges.
He told MPs: "There remains a public emergency threatening the life of the nation."
He accepted the law lords' ruling but argued detention powers had helped prevent attacks and deter terrorists.
The current detainees would not be freed until the new powers were in place as they were still considered a national security threat, he told MPs.
There have been calls for the rules for wire-tap and intercept evidence to be allowed to be used in courts but Mr Clarke refused to back that change.
He said intercept evidence was only a small part of the case against the men and some of it could not be used because it could put sources' lives at risk.
Most of the terror suspects are being held indefinitely at Belmarsh prison, in London.
Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis was worried about extending special powers to cover British citizens.
He warned: "Throughout history, internment has generally backfired because of the resentment it creates to.
"So unless the process is clearly just, the home secretary could find himself confining one known terrorist only to recruit 10 unknown terrorists."
He suggested changing the law to let a security-cleared judges view evidence gathered by phone-tapping could allow more terror cases to come to court.
Liberal Democrat spokesman Mark Oaten also backed use of wire-tap evidence.
He said the standard of proof for the new powers would have to be "very high indeed" and he asked whether ministers had looked at measures which fitted with human rights laws.
Shami Chakrabarti, from human rights group Liberty, joined calls for intercept evidence to be allowed in trials.
She said: "Adherence to the rule of law should not be a game of cat and mouse. The government should not swap one human rights 'opt out' for another."
Blow away the Magna Carta and the Common Law simply because they have to treat aliens the same as citizens?
British law certainly does apply to 'everybody on the planet' if they happen (as in this case) to be in Britain at the time of their arrest, are suspected of having committed offences on British territory, and are subsequently held in Britain. It's in almost every respect the antithesis of, say, the Guantanamo scenario, where offence, arrest and detention all happened outside the territory of the detaining country.
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