This was registered by the
community most affected but the British public, in whose name these
actions were taken, remained ignorant: that the state was seen to be
combating terrorism sufficed. Central to the anger and despair that
fuelled the conflict was the realisation that the British courts offered
neither protection nor justice. The Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday,
which was carried out by the lord chief justice, absolved the British army
and backed its false account of 13 murders, ensuring that Irish
nationalists would see the legal system as being aligned against them.
We should keep all this in
mind as we look at the experiences of our new suspect community. Just as
Irish men and women, wherever they lived, knew every detail of each
injustice as if it had been done to them, long before British men and
women were even aware that entire Irish families had been wrongly
imprisoned in their country for decades, so Muslim men and women here and
across the world are registering the ill treatment of their community here
and recognising too the analogies with the experiences of the Irish.
As good a place to start as
any is December 19, 2001. On this date a dozen men, all foreign nationals,
were interned in this country. Recognising the connotations of the term
‘internment’, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland, the
government insisted this was not equivalent to arbitrary detention without
trial, a practice forbidden by the European Convention on Human Rights
except in extreme emergencies, because each man was free to leave. The
premise on which they were detained was that the United Kingdom could not
in fact send them back to their countries of origin since it was accepted
that they would be at the very least a target for torture, if they were
not killed on arrival.
December 2001 did not in fact
mark the beginning of Britain’s official interest in men described as
‘Islamists’, since some from Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria who
were in this country as refugees had long been the subjects of complaints
to the UK by the regimes they had fled. After 9/11 however Tony Blair
professed a desire to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with President Bush. It
would have been difficult to match Bush’s executive onslaught on
constitutional rights in the US by means of the Patriot Act; the
designation of ‘enemy combatants’ and their detention by presidential
order; the abolition of habeas corpus; the subjection of detainees to
torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo or their unofficial outsourcing via
rendition flights to countries specialising in even more grotesque
interrogative practices, many of them those same regimes which had
pressured the UK to take action against their own dissidents.
Claiming that a parallel
emergency faced Britain, Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of
internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of
foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the
detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an
auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it,
was not allowed to see the detainee.
The most useful device of the
executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national
security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on December 17,
2001 and delivered to HMP Belmarsh (a high security prison) expressed
astonishment: first, at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted
legislation and second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each
asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had
never been questioned by police or the security services before it was
decided that he was a ‘risk to national security’. The sole activity which
some speculated might be the reason for their detention was their attempt
to support Chechens when in 1999 their country was the subject of a second
brutal invasion by Russia. But thousands of others had acted similarly and
such support was not unlawful.
Each man was told that, for a
reason that could not be disclosed, he was in some unspecified way thought
to be linked to unspecified persons or organisations in turn linked to al-Qaeda,
which was then depicted by now discredited ‘al-Qaeda experts’ as taking
the form of the hierarchical pyramid of classic western military systems.
At the base of the pyramid were those who had been interned, almost all of
whom said that they had never heard of al-Qaeda before September 11, 2001.
All of this echoed other wrongful detentions, like that of John Walker in
1974 when the West Midlands police coerced an innocent Irishman into
confessing that he was an IRA ‘brigadier’, ignorant of the fact that such
a title existed only in the British army. This confession was nevertheless
swallowed whole. Walker was one of the Birmingham Six, all of whom spent
16 years in jail before the assertions of their prosecutors were finally
discredited.
There should have been no
need for the Muslim community to anticipate a similar wait, since just
before Christmas 2005, three and a half years after internment had been
rushed through Parliament, the House of Lords gave its judgement on that
legislation in what should have stood as the most important legacy of
British law in recent history. The law lords swept aside what had been
said by the attorney general to constitute a just system necessary for
national security. Focusing on the government’s disproportionate response
to a claimed emergency and its indefinite detention only of foreign
nationals, the language of the law lords was heroic in its strength. There
was a sense that the ruling’s importance went far beyond its importance to
the 12 detainees, eight of whom had now been driven into mental illness,
four of those into florid psychosis, and had been transferred by the home
secretary from Belmarsh to Broadmoor (a high security psychiatric
hospital).
Since the judgement however,
signalling as it did that the government had impermissibly crossed the
legal barriers guaranteed by domestic and international treaties, it has
become clear that the government intends to ignore the spirit if not the
letter of the decision. It has also become clear that the government had,
and continues to have, a wider strategy of which internment legislation
was only one part. Little by little, ripples of information have found
their way to the surface, sometimes confirmed by the government, sometimes
denied. While the world knows and can assess for itself what chains of
reaction were created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by the
enormity of injustice suffered by the Palestinians, the cumulative effect
of many other policies deserves analysis.
It emerged, for instance,
that in late 2001 the UK had begun to tip off other governments, for the
ultimate benefit of the US, of the whereabouts of British nationals and
British residents. Moazzem Begg, who was living with his wife and children
in Pakistan, was kidnapped in January 2002; within hours he was in the
hands of Americans (with a British intelligence agent to hand) and
transported without any semblance of legality to Bagram airbase in
Afghanistan, by this time an interrogation camp where torture was
practised. After a year during which he witnessed the murders of two
fellow detainees, he was moved to Guantánamo Bay. Until he finally
returned to this country in 2005, nothing was known of the presence at his
abduction of a British agent. Instead, for the whole of that year in
Bagram, the foreign and commonwealth office repeatedly told his father
that they had no information about Begg and that the Americans would tell
them nothing.
Seemingly unrelated areas of
injustice, we now learn, have all along been connected. Two British
residents, acknowledged to have been seized in 2002 in the Gambia and
subjected to rendition by the US as a direct result of information
provided by British intelligence, were for the next five years subjected
to interrogation (including torture) primarily to obtain information about
a man interned in this country. One of those interned in December 2001, a
Palestinian, trying to guess the reason for his detention the next year,
told his lawyers that he had raised money for many years to build wells
and schools and to provide food in Afghanistan. One of those wells, he
said, bore the name of the son of its donor, Moazzem Begg. The
Palestinian’s lawyers, knowing by now that Begg was in Guantánamo, started
to think the unthinkable.
During hearings at the
Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), at which these cases are
heard, there is a brief opportunity for the detainee’s lawyer to question
an anonymous security service witness concealed behind a curtain, before
the lawyer is asked to leave the court so it can continue its
consideration of secret evidence. The witness was asked: ‘Would you use
evidence that was obtained by torture?’ The unhesitating answer was:
‘Yes’. The only issue that might arise, the agent added, would be the
weight such evidence should be given. Three years after this, in December
2005 the House of Lords affirmed the principle that no English court can
ever admit evidence derived from torture, no matter how strong the claimed
justification or emergency. The message for the government was again
unequivocal: the principles of legal obligation must be adhered to in all
circumstances.
Despite the strength and
intended permanence of these two rulings by the House of Lords however,
many Muslims have come to see any protection from the courts as
constituting only a temporary impediment before the government starts to
implement a new method of avoidance. After three months of prevarication,
the internees were released on bail under stringent conditions but the
home office was simultaneously pushing yet more emergency legislation
through Parliament, this time to introduce control orders which placed a
substantial number of restrictions on the now released detainees. Any
breach would constitute a criminal offence carrying a penalty of up to
five years’ imprisonment.
Three of the detainees,
including the Palestinian, were pitchforked out of Broadmoor during the
night and driven by police to empty flats. One of them, a man without
arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact
anyone without committing a criminal offence, subject to a curfew and
allowed no visitors unless approved in advance by the home office. Two of
these three detainees were immediately readmitted to psychiatric
hospitals; neither of them had been hospitalised before being interned.
These men had already been found to have patterns of psychological damage
explicable only as a result of their indefinite detention.
Other former detainees,
particularly those with wives and children, soon began to recognise the
disturbing effects of the control orders. The electronic tag they had to
wear, which registered every entry and exit from the house, was only one
element of a family’s altered existence; a voice recognition system was
supposed to confirm the detainee’s presence at home during curfew but the
machines, of US manufacture, often failed to recognise the accents of
Arabic speakers, with the result that uniformed police officers would
enter the house in significant numbers at all times of the day and night.
No visitor would come near their homes because to enter required first to
be vetted by the home office. Children could do no schoolwork that
involved the internet, the use of which was forbidden. Families had
endlessly to involve lawyers in the most trivial matters: to obtain
permission to go into the garden; to attend a parent-teacher meeting; to
arrange for a plumber to enter the house.
What happened to these men?
Are they still, three years later, trying to live normal lives despite the
restrictions? The answer came only five months after their release. On
July 7, 2005 bombs exploded in London. Within days it was known that the
bombings had been carried out by young men born and bred in Yorkshire. On
August 5, Blair announced that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ and
that diplomatic agreements were being made to deport the same small group
of detainees to their countries of origin although the government knew
that the use of torture was still routine in these countries. It was said
that an assurance would be obtained that the men themselves would not be
tortured after they were returned and that an independent monitoring
organisation in each country would guarantee that this was being adhered
to. Despite such assurances, these deportations flew in the face of two
important legal commitments to which this country is obliged to adhere:
one, to send no person to a country where there is a risk to him of
torture, the central premise of the Refugee Convention, and two, to
achieve the eradication of torture (and not by negotiating a single
exception, while offering no protest to a regime’s use of torture on
others).
On August 11, the Algerian
and Jordanian former internees were again arrested. There were soon more
arrests, this time of two Algerians who had been acquitted unanimously in
a trial at the Old Bailey in April 2005 of involvement in a conspiracy to
use ricin, an allegation that had been seized on at the time of their
original arrest by Colin Powell in his attempt to justify the invasion of
Iraq to the UN. (One juror described how for him a moment of truth came
early in the trial when a witness from Porton Down nervously drank three
containers of water while in the witness box seeking to explain why an
early lab report said to have been conveyed to the police and confirming
that there was no trace of ricin had, curiously, never reached the cabinet
office.)
Those detainees who remain in
the United Kingdom are still in prison or under extreme bail restrictions.
One has been returned twice to Broadmoor from prison before being bailed
to a psychiatric hospital. There are now two more Jordanian detainees and
several Algerians while Libya rapidly became the third state to promise
safe re-entry to its dissident citizens. As for the promised monitoring
organisations, one was purpose-built in Jordan in 2005, a husband and wife
team bankrolled by the UK, which by the summer of 2007 (when 2,000 inmates
in one Jordanian prison were beaten the day after the first ever visit of
an NGO, Human Rights Watch, to whose representatives they had complained
of torture) had still never visited a prison. In Libya, the independent
monitor agreed to by Britain is the Ghadafi Foundation, headed by Colonel
Ghadafi’s son.
Algeria never signed a
memorandum of understanding with Britain, nor did it appoint an
independent monitor, although both safeguards were said by Blair to be
non-negotiable precursors to deportation. Constant prevarication was
ascribed initially to the Algerian president’s ill health and then to
meetings being postponed until finally the detainees’ appeals against
deportation could be delayed no longer. The SIAC, hearing evidence in
large part in secret, found that Algeria’s ‘body politic’ appeared to have
moved to ‘a state of lesser danger’ for perceived dissidents, that a
limited amnesty was on offer so that the refugees would not be put on
trial and thus that it was safe to deport them. Several Algerians in
prison here or under severe restrictions decided to return. As they said
in a letter to a British newspaper: ‘We are choosing the alternative of a
quick death in Algeria to a slow death here.’
In making this decision, two
of the Algerians, Benaissa Taleb and Rida Dendani, dramatically
miscalculated. Astonishingly, the SIAC allows secret evidence to be given
even on the issue of an individual’s future safety. Had the men properly
understood the reality (or more important the fragility) of diplomatic
arrangements, perhaps neither would have decided to return. Each was told
that an amnesty applied in Algeria which he should sign even though he had
committed no offence; indeed special arrangements were made by the home
office for each man to have bail to attend the Algerian embassy in London
for this purpose. Each believed that he would not be detained more than a
few hours on arrival and that, as the British diplomat organising these
deportations had promised the SIAC, there was no risk that he would be
held by the infamous DRS secret police. In fact, they were both
interrogated for 12 days during which they were threatened and subjected
to serious physical ill treatment. They were then charged, tried and some
months later convicted, on the basis of the ‘confessions’ forced from them
during this time. Dendani was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment,
Taleb to three.
At the heart of Britain’s
reassurances as to their safety had been the confidence that the Algerians
would place too high a value on their relationship with Britain to risk
its disapproval. No British official has ever attempted to visit either
man in prison despite reports that both continue to be held in conditions
that violate every international norm; no official attended their trials
and the fact that visa applications by the men’s UK lawyers have been
ignored for a year by the Algerian authorities despite repeated requests
for help from our government has been commented on with amusement during
proceedings before the SIAC as evidence of Algeria’s independent spirit. A
desperate letter describing how he had been tortured was sent by Dendani
from Algeria to the president of the SIAC. It brought no response. Despite
all this, it is still maintained that it is safe to deport people to
Algeria. An application on behalf of appellants for a secret hearing at
which information given to lawyers by those afraid of providing it in the
open could be properly and safely examined has been rejected, not because
the SIAC considered the proposal without merit but because the court’s
rules, it appears, do not allow for such a procedure.
Is the treatment of these two
men simply a blip in an otherwise safe and lawful process? Is it
reasonable for the Muslim community to see wider significance in the
treatment of such individuals? Over the past year it has emerged that
Britain has secretly been willing to disregard the most basic principles
of refugee protection. First, we learnt that Taleb’s interrogation by the
DRS was indisputably based on information received by the Algerians from
the UK. Not only did Algeria possess the 2003 findings against him by the
SIAC (under the internment legislation that the House of Lords
subsequently held to be unlawful) but it has now been discovered that the
asylum claims of possibly all of this small group of detainees have been
passed to the regimes from which they had fled.
Asylum rests on the central
premise of confidentiality and a clear promise to that effect is given by
the home office to all those who claim asylum here. After all, the
contents of the application, or the very fact of its having been made,
might create danger for the applicant if he returned to his country of
origin. In the case of one man whose appeal against the home office’s
request to deport him has not yet been considered by the SIAC, we have
discovered that a specially commissioned medical report describing his
vulnerable condition has already been prepared by Belmarsh and sent to
Jordan.
Taleb, known throughout his
internment only by a letter of the alphabet so that his family in Algeria
would not be at risk, arrived there to find that all the information about
him based on secret evidence under now abandoned legislation was held by
the Algerians, un-anonymised. Taleb had decided to return to Algeria in
the hope he would be safe and so no court in Britain had ordered his
deportation. Yet the Algerians possessed all the British government’s
‘evidence’ about him. His subsequent trial confirmed his worst fears.
His Algerian lawyers argued,
and he gave evidence of this himself, that he had signed an unread
‘confession’ after spending 12 days in DRS custody and after having been
beaten by his interrogators. The presiding judge countered by referring to
the ‘West’ and its ‘illusory democracy’: ‘Weren’t you imprisoned, confined
to your home for several years without trial, without charge and without
respect for any procedure of either inquiry or investigation in a
democratic country par excellence, Great Britain? No one in this court can
teach us a lesson or put to us the least complaint on this matter, since
in this country no person has been subject to such treatment.’ Taleb’s
claim for asylum in the UK he saw as amounting to a ‘betrayal’ of his
country of origin. Asylum was accorded ‘only to those who hated their own
country’ and the judge commented at length on Algerians who had gone
abroad and painted a black picture of the country’s human rights situation
‘to the benefit of NGOs whose time was spent vitiating the truth about
Algeria’.
Taleb’s eventual conviction
was, curiously, for going to Afghanistan in 1991 to fight the Russians. In
fact, he went to Pakistan in 1991 as an idealistic 18-year-old, where he
taught refugees from Afghanistan; the Russians had left two years earlier.
As for the amnesty he had signed? Not only its relevance but its existence
was denied. The United Kingdom displayed no interest in any of this. The
reality is that British Petroleum has sunk £6 billion into obtaining oil
from Algerian southern Sahara; the US and the EU are scrambling with the
UK for a slice of Libya’s economic potential; and Jordan, one fifth of
whose annual national income is provided by the US, is content to act as
its most reliable provider of safe destinations for rendition and torture.
In February (2008) a
judgement published by the European Court of Human Rights in the case of a
Tunisian whom Italy sought to deport, although Tunisia continues to
practise torture, revealed that the UK had tried to intervene in the case
in the hope of undoing one of the European Court’s most important
decisions, Chahal vs UK, in which the court insisted that the claim
of a risk to national security could never trump a European country’s
international obligation not to return a refugee who might be tortured.
The European Court rejected this attempt in strong terms.
Through myriad other routes
Britain attempts to evade internationally recognised legal restraints.
Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights
lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own
country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety
would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his
detention, private memoranda between Blair and the home office were made
public. Across a note from the home office expressing concern that even
hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection
against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back’.
Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why
do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge but
today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the
subject of a UN assets freezing order managed by the treasury. He has no
assets, no income and no work and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’
without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She
requires a licence to cook them and is obliged to account for every penny
spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled so is
compelled to pass the obligation onto their children who have to submit
monthly accounts to the treasury of every apple bought from the market,
every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and
imprisonable offence.
A few weeks ago in the House
of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at ‘the meanness and squalor’ of a
regime ‘that monitored who had what for breakfast’. The number of such
cases now multiplies daily. They have nothing at all to do with national
security, they only succeed, as they are intended to, in sapping morale;
they have everything to do with reinforcing the growing belief of the
suspect community that it is expected to eradicate its opinions, its
identity and many of the core precepts of its religion.
In December 2001 it was a
small group of foreign nationals who paid the price for Blair’s wish to
show solidarity with the US; and their predicament has never been widely
known or understood beyond the Muslim community. But joining them in
prison today are more and more young British men and occasionally, women.
Many have little or no idea why they are there although even more
disturbingly, the majority were tried by the courts in conventional trials
before conventional juries. Why is it therefore that the accused do not
seem to comprehend why they are there when the prosecution has in any
trial to serve all of its evidence in the form of statements, in order to
inform the defendant of the case against him? The answer is that the vice
underlying the internment/deportation cases is now being perpetrated in
conventional trials. The accusations are similarly inchoate: defendants
are said to be ‘linked to terrorism’ or ‘linked to extremism and/or
radical ideology’. In these cases, the evidence before the court has time
and again been found after a search on a defendant’s computer or in a
notebook; the defendant is charged with possession of a certain item or
this item is held to demonstrate the defendant’s desire to incite,
encourage or glorify terrorism.
The right to a fair trial is
in many ways difficult to articulate. If a defendant believes his or her
prosecution is unjust, does he or she have any concepts to hang onto that
are not entirely nebulous unless they can prove, as those wrongly
convicted in Birmingham or Guildford did, that their confessions had been
brutally coerced? Or in the case of Judith Ward, when it was proved that
the prosecution had withheld for 18 years evidence that disproved her
claimed fantasies, or that of Danny McNamee, in which the information that
circuit boards identical to those he was held to have used were in the
possession of an actual bomb maker was kept from his defence and a
fingerprint was claimed to be his when it was not. In each of these cases,
bad, misleading and on occasion false ‘expert’ evidence also played its
part.
Less well-known guarantees of
a fair trial do however exist, just as clear protections for refugees
exist, which were equally intended to hold good for all time and in the
face of all emergencies. The relevant provisos, which underpin the right
to a fair trial, are that the law should be clear and certain so that
individuals can be confident that their behaviour does not transgress the
limits society has set; that the application of the law should never be
retrospective; and that there are protections intended to preserve freedom
of speech, religion, thought and privacy. Young Muslims search the
internet in their tens of thousands, as do non-Muslims. Any internet
search however leaves an ineradicable trace which can and does provide
material that puts its searcher now at risk of prosecution for possession
of information that might be ‘of use to terrorists’. They even risk arrest
for writing anything that could be said to ‘incite’ or ‘encourage’
‘terrorism’.
This is the context of many
current prosecutions. The fruits of a police search are uncovered,
prosecutions mounted for the ‘possession’ of literature, films and
pamphlets bought or viewed on websites, even if that viewing was swift and
the item discarded or even deleted. The defendants are stigmatised as
potential terrorists and their cases considered by juries more often than
not without even one Muslim among their ranks to provide what the concept
of 12 jurors randomly selected is intended to contribute to the trial
process – a reflection of the collective good sense of the community.
Two young Muslim women were
separately tried at the Old Bailey last year for having written works
deemed by the prosecution to be for a terrorist objective. One was the
‘Lyrical Terrorist’ whose appeal against conviction is due to be heard
shortly. The other, Bouchra El-Hor, was acquitted by her jury; she had the
good fortune to have as a defence witness Carmen Callil who witheringly
described the letter that El-Hor had written as a classic example of the
way devout women, whether Catholic or Quaker, Puritan or Muslim,
experiment with creative writing as a means of expression while living
isolated existences. The jury laughed at Callil’s savage critique but one
could see recognition and understanding follow.
This is very dangerous
territory however where a lucky accident of interpretation is critical to
a jury’s understanding of a case and where police and prosecutors, neither
of them armed with any understanding of Islam, press on with prosecutions
although the court struggles properly to understand what is at issue.
Where the human story is straightforward, the task is far easier but even
so, now that secret accusations and secret courts have intruded into the
sacrosanct forum of an open jury trial in which secrecy is not allowed,
what is a jury to make of an allegation that a defendant has breached a
control order imposed on the basis of secret evidence which holds that he
is a risk to national security?
On trial just before
Christmas was a young Essex Muslim, Ceri Bullivant, who had been placed
under a control order and then charged with a criminal offence when he
absconded, unable to cope with the restrictions of that order. In his case
the jury magnificently acquitted him on the basis that he had a reasonable
excuse to breach his order. It was only later however, in the high court,
that what lay behind the secrecy became suddenly clearer. Mr Justice
Collins quashed the order itself; before he did so, an intelligence agent
giving evidence from behind a screen admitted that the tip-off which had
led to the decision that Bullivant was a risk to national security and
‘associated with links to terrorists’ had come from a friend of Ceri’s
mother who, after drinking heavily, had phoned Scotland Yard which failed
ever to contact the caller to ask for further explanation. Equally
disturbingly, a childhood friend of Bullivant’s told the court that he had
been approached by MI5 officers and asked to spy on local Muslim youth.
When he pointed out this was unlikely to be productive since he was not
himself a Muslim, he was encouraged to become one and told that ‘converts
are given a special welcome’.
From a distance such
blundering negligence might seem merely laughable but those affected by it
feel resentment, anger and despair. Why should young people as much a part
of Britain as any other citizen require what are in effect interpreters to
establish their innocence? The more religiously based the evidence, the
greater the opportunity for obstinate incomprehension. Conspicuous by its
absence in case after case is any evidence, expert or otherwise, proffered
by the prosecution that attempts to explain the most basic concepts of
Islam to a non-Muslim jury.
Take the instance of a saying
of the Prophet Muhammad familiar to all Muslims: ‘Fight the unbelievers
with your wealth, yourselves and your tongues.’ Should a man who made a
supplication in those terms in Regent’s Park Mosque on the holiest night
of Ramadan four years ago, in support of the citizens of Fallujah who were
that night defending their city in the face of the announced eradication
by US troops of all who remained there, have anticipated that he might be
breaking the law or that he could be charged and prosecuted in 2008 after
a friend’s home video of his prayer was found by police in a raid? He had,
after all, repeated those same challenging words many times over the years
and explained again and again to the public, to the police and politicians
one of the most fundamental concepts of Islam, the ummah, which makes
every Muslim anywhere in the world the brother of every other Muslim so
that if one is attacked others are obliged to help. Should he be surprised
to be prosecuted for having reiterated these same words of support in a
mosque?
The answer lies in Blair’s
warning: ‘The rules of the game have changed.’ Previously accepted
boundaries of freedom of expression and thought have been redefined and
are now in effect being prosecuted retrospectively, with the result that
our criminal justice system is becoming further distorted as many truly
innocent defendants plead guilty, against their lawyers’ advice, terrified
by the prospect, as they see it, of inevitable conviction and ever
lengthening prison sentences. Thousands of others, all of whom have
searched the internet, watch with horror the process of criminalisation
and punishment.
In this country we did not
grow up with a written constitution and human rights legislation entered
our law only recently. In times of tension we struggle to find answers to
basic questions. Are there rules and can they be changed? Are there legal
concepts that protect a community under blanket suspicion or should that
community’s adverse reaction to suspicion be seen as oversensitivity in
the face of perceived political necessity? Should we accept the concept of
the greatest good for the greatest number? The answer is again the same:
we are bound by international treaty and belatedly, by domestic human
rights legislation, to hold that there are inalienable rights that attach
to the individual rather than society. Article 8 of the European
Convention protects not only respect for family and private life but also
the individual against humiliating treatment; Article 10 protects freedom
of expression, Article 9 freedom of thought, conscience and religion and
Article 14 guarantees that in the enjoyment of these rights any
discrimination is itself prohibited. Occasionally, fierce campaigning
successfully sounds an alarm: the proposed extension from 28 to 42 days of
the time allowed for questioning those suspected of involvement in
terrorism is being energetically fought. But there are less obvious
erosions of parallel rights.
If this is indeed how it was
for the Irish, we should urgently try to understand how significant change
came about for them. Much current reminiscence ignores vital factors, such
as the inescapable responsibility of the Irish republic and, above all,
the political weight of the Irish diaspora and the far-sightedness of
those who began and maintained contact, long before Blair was elected and
claimed the ultimate prize. Throughout the 30 years of conflict, 40
million Americans of Irish descent formed an electoral statistic that no
US administration could afford to ignore. It is said that on the night
before he decided to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton watched a
film about the catastrophic injustice inflicted on one Irish family by the
British state. Here, Lord Scarman and Lord Devlin, retired law lords,
joined Cardinal Hume, the head of the Catholic church in England, in
educating themselves in the finest detail of three sets of wrongful
convictions involving 14 defendants. At one critical moment Cardinal Hume
confronted the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, challenging the adequacy of
his briefing.
No similar allies for the
Muslim community are evident today, capable of pushing and pulling the
British government publicly or privately into seeing sense. Spiritually,
the Muslim ummah is seen as being infinite but the powerful regimes of the
Muslim world almost without exception not only themselves perpetrate
oppression but choose to work hand in hand with the US and the UK in their
‘war on terror’. It is for us, as a nation, to take stock of ourselves. We
are very far along a destructive path and if our government continues on
that path we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal
fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting. The choice and the
responsibility are entirely ours.