News & events
Legal rights under threat
Jeremy Corbyn: One of the narratives of the last parliament was the very strange alliances that were formed to oppose new Labour's anti-terror laws but current plans published in the Justice and Security Green Paper are quite disastrous and are a far cry from the brief conservative love in with civil liberties during the new Labour government.
Published in the Morning Star
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/116047
Many of us who opposed the various Bills by Charles Clarke, Jack Straw and David Blunkett did so in order to protect the right of trial by jury, in opposition to executive detention and to express our outrage at the idea of secret courts operating in Britain.
The Labour members who opposed were often joined by Lib Dems, and on some occasions by the official Conservative opposition.
A previous generation of MPs, mainly labour, opposed the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act because it enshrined in law the right of the state to deny someone access to evidence against them and gave the political executives the power to detain without charge or trial.
The Special Immigration Appeals Courts (SIAC) are an outrageous product of the anti-terror laws from 2001 onwards.
These courts meet mainly in secret and only the prosecution and the judge know the full nature of the evidence against the defendant and the identity of the witnesses.
The representatives of the defendants are not allowed to reveal to their client the details of some of the evidence that has been obtained by security services and on this basis imprisonment can follow.
Moreover, the ability of the state to place people under house arrest has been slightly altered by the introduction of Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIM), which enable restrictions to be placed on an individual on the basis of uncorroborated security service information.
The narrative behind these laws is essentially the protection of security services in their collection of evidence and ability to prosecute individuals where a case would not be successful under criminal law because the evidence could not be placed before the court.
For a country that prides itself on abiding by international law and human rights standards, it is an extraordinary set of circumstances that we have in Britain.
As if this was not bad enough, former prime minister Tony Blair, in order to facilitate the deportation of "inconvenient" people who had not been charged or processed through the British legal system, signed a series of letters of agreement with north African and Middle Eastern countries to allow deportation of "terror" suspects despite the non-adherence of those countries to the UN Convention Against Torture, or indeed observance of any human rights norms that are enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.
To some extent Blair has got his comeuppance with the launch of a case in British courts by a former Libyan dissident, now member of the Transitional National Council, who was apparently removed illegally from a third country to Libya where he was subsequently tortured by the agents of the Gadaffi government.
The government came out with a new plan in the justice and security green paper and in its introduction Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke rather gives the game away when he says that the three objectives of the process are to better equip courts to pass judgement in cases involving sensitive information - protect national security by preventing damaging disclosure of genuinely national security sensitive material, modernise judicial, independent and parliamentary scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies to improve public confidence.
The plans however, are quite disastrous and are a far cry from the brief conservative love in with civil liberties during the new Labour government.
In the development of key principles the green paper reiterates much of what was put in the introduction by Clarke but goes on to say that there has to be reform of intelligence oversight.
This issue was formerly grappled with by Blair who proposed the establishment of a parliamentary select committee on the security services, which sounds like a welcome extension of the powers of public scrutiny over the executive.
The reality was probably worse than having no public scrutiny. It lead to the establishment of a select committee appointed by the prime minister - not the House of Commons - whose duty was to report to the PM on their views on the operation of the security services.
The green paper goes on to propose the continuation, indeed enhancement of the idea of special advocates - ie people approved by the state to operate on behalf of defendants, as with the SIAC courts - and further enshrining public interest immunity in legislation.
The opposition to this whole raft of proposals is gathering some pace and indeed, former Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis used the Daily Mail on Wednesday to deliver a trenchant assault on these proposals.
He condemns the use of public interest immunity which has been used to cover up inconvenient cases. In cases such the death of Jean Charles de Menezes public interest immunity could be used and similarly in many other cases.
The answer to the whole issue of inconvenient evidence and inconvenient cases is not to go down the road of secret courts using closed material and unidentified witnesses, but to use the criminal law against criminal acts.
This is a green paper and one hopes that those people who mistakenly were sucked into anti-terror legislation after 2001 would realise the dangers including criminalising whole communities.
There has always been a significant group of MPs in the Tory Party who are strongly opposed to the existence of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights, and with it, the European Convention.
The 1998 Human Rights Act enshrined the European Convention in British law and thus considerably enhanced the human rights of all British citizens and confirmed their right to appeal to the European Court.
The convention and court have made enormous differences to the human rights of many people across Europe including migrant workers, prisoners and oppressed minorities such as Roma people.
They have also served to act as a break on the excesses of national courts which are fully aware that the citizens before them have the right to go to the European Court.
The British government and, sadly, the front bench opposition were very annoyed when the court ruled in favour of prisoner's voting rights and more recently that Abu Qatada could not be deported to a country that is not a signatory of UN Convention Against Torture.
In a typically populist response to this the PM has been openly critical of the European Court and while not promising to leave the system, has promised to reform Britain's participation in it.
Proposals yet to be published during the British presidency of the Council of Europe suggest that Britain wants to have it both ways - claiming they support the European Convention and Court but thinking that our decisions should be made by national courts rather than the European Court.
In a leaked report to the BBC the government's position is that the European court should not be able to examine cases that are identical in substance to a claim that is being considered by a national court.
That undermines the whole principle of the right of a citizen in any European Convention country to go to the European Court if they believe an injustice has been done.
The proposals in the Justice and Security green paper, the leaked proposals for reducing Britain's participation in the European Court of Human Rights and a 60 per cent cut in the funding of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, together indicate just what a low priority the government assigns to the protection of human rights.
Our rights to assembly, freedom of speech and organisation and protection of people against racism and systematic ethic abuse have been hard fought and hard won and we should not allow them to be taken away in this cavalier manner.