Brown and Terror

One of toughest policy arenas that Gordon Brown will face when he replaces Tony Blair this week, will be anti-terrorism legislation. The escalation in radical Islamist activity in the UK from the mid 1990s onwards - culminating in several (mostly foiled) plots against British interests - was a defining issue for Blair in his last few years in office. Brown will have to walk the legal tightrope as his predecessor did and will mostly likely face similar stiff parliamentary and pressure group scrutiny. Human Rights Watch has proposed that Brown undertakes an urgent renewal and re-think of current counterterrorism policies. “The Blair government’s counterterrorism policies have breached human rights, damaged relations with the country’s Muslims, and tarnished Britain’s standing abroad,” said Benjamin Ward, Europe and Central Asia associate director at Human Rights Watch. “A change of course is urgently needed.”

In their briefing paper “Hearts and Minds: Putting Human Rights at the Center of United Kingdom Counterterrorism Policy”, HRW criticise current policy as breaching human rights and in turn losing the battle for hearts and minds. The paper's proposals include:

• The government’s use of unreliable promises contained in “memorandums of understanding” to return terrorism suspects to countries, including Jordan and Libya, where they face the risk of torture. The government has pursued this policy despite clear evidence that such “diplomatic assurances” from countries where torture is a problem are an ineffective safeguard against abuse.
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  The UK’s attempts to persuade the European Court of Human Rights to overturn long-standing case law by allowing an exception on the total ban on returns to risk of ill-treatment.
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  The extension of the period that terrorism suspects can be detained without charge from 14 to 28 days, the longest in the European Union. The government has signaled it intends to renew efforts to extend pre-charge detention to 90 days – equivalent to the average time served in a six-month prison sentence – despite the lack of any evidence that such an extraordinary period is needed to investigate those suspected of terrorism offences.
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  The use of control orders that seriously restrict liberty on the basis of evidence that falls well below that required to convict a person for a crime. British courts have already struck down eight out of 19 control orders issued on the grounds that they breached human rights.
  
• The government’s enactment into law of the offense of “encouragement of terrorism,” which criminalizes “glorification” of terrorism in a way that at best has a chilling effect on free speech and at worst violates the right to free expression.
  
• The government’s refusal to allow the use of intercept evidence, acquired by phone tap, to facilitate the prosecution of those accused of involvement in terrorism. The UK is the only Western country with such a total ban.

Like other policy areas, Brown's views on counterterrorist strategy are fairly unknown. The resignation this weekend of Lord Goldsmith may give the impression that a different tact might follow, but whilst the public faces of counterterrorism change, behind the scenes policymakers (and threats) will probably stay the same. Brown stated his support for ID cards and detention without trial last year. Predictably he has promised treasury resources to counter terrorist groups use of the international financial system. Addressing the specially arranged Labour conference today, Brown reiterated that learning from the mistakes in Iraq and winning back Muslim confidence were critical to his counterterrorist strategy. This issue will define Brown's premiership, learning from Blair's mistakes will be a key aim, but inevitably he will struggle to get the balance between human rights and national security right.