MUST READ: BRITAIN'S HUMAN RIGHTS FARCE

Britain’s human rights farce
by Melanie Phillips

The primary duty of any government is to protect its citizens. In any normal society, people who are thought to be dangerous are jailed. Those suspected of terrorist leanings are either locked up or, if they are foreign nationals, thrown out of the country.

But not in Britain. Some of the foreign terrorist suspects are not locked up at all. Instead, the Government allows them to remain in their homes under ‘control orders’. And then it loses them.

Two days ago, three terrorist suspects absconded while under such control orders and are now on the run. We now learn that ’solid intelligence’ indicated that the three absconders intended to blow up British and other Allied troops abroad.

This brings to a total of six the number of terror suspects whom the British security authorities have managed to lose while the subject of control orders.

The system is a farcical shambles. Even worse, the Home Office tried to keep these earlier disappearances secret. We know about this latest triple flight only because the police insisted that the public should be informed of these men’s identities.

It appears that these three men were able to abscond because they were required to do no more than surrender their passports and report to a telephone monitoring company or to the police.

As for why the men weren’t subject to more stringent restrictions, the answer was that they didn’t pose a direct threat to Britain.

But in that case, why were they on a control order at all?

It is surely common sense to acknowledge that, if people are believed to pose a terrorist threat to Britons abroad, they are quite likely to pose a threat to Britons at home too.

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The plain fact is the Government refuses to do anything about it. It regards the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the Convention into English law and in so doing turned it into a judicial straitjacket, as an article of faith.

Dr Reid has, it is true, never hidden his fury at this Act for tying his hands over terror suspects. But it is the government of which he is a member that has tied its own hands in this way.

The truth is that this country cannot fight the mortal threat posed by Islamist terrorism in this way. We should derogate from the Convention or else come out of it altogether.

And we also need a different type of judicial process for terrorist cases. In Northern Ireland, we adopted the juryless Diplock courts to cope with the special circumstances of Irish terrorism. We need something similar to meet the vastly greater threat we now face.

Anything less shows that we are not taking this threat seriously. And the consequences of such frivolity may well be even more loss of life - the greatest human right of all.


Pertinent Links:

1) Britain’s human rights farce