The WEEK ending 18 November 2001
Right across the Western world governments are hurriedly introducing repressive legislation undermining free speech, freedom of association, liberty of the person, privacy of information and due process of law.
GLOBAL REPRESSION
This is just some of the 'highlights' from selected countries:
USA
- Military courts for terrorist suspects
The USA Patriot Act - Administrative detention of non-citizens committing offences (including violation of visa conditions if they cannot be deported) - Reduction of judicial supervision over official surveillance of telephone and internet communication - Criminalisation of membership and support for 'terrorist groups'- Vague legal definition of terrorist group to include any 'violent activity' including by domestic groups - Secret surveillance of private financial information with no judicial scrutiny - Removal of almost all restrictions on police access to information on students
Britain
Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Bill - Indefinite detention of foreign 'suspected terrorists' - Law against incitement of religious hatred - Forcible photographing of arrested suspects - Police power to demand removal of clothing that obscures identity - Expansion of jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defence police - Unrestricted access for police to electronic and telephone communication data for all investigations - New offence of failure to supply police with information regarding terrorism - Powers to seize funds belonging to suspected terrorists
Canada
Anti-Terrorism Act - Wide definition of terrorism including acts committed out of jurisdiction - Legal designation of 'terrorist groups' and criminalisation of participation in them - Increased police surveillance powers over electronic data - Widening the Official Secrets Act - New offence of failure to supply police with information regarding terrorism - Preventative detention of suspected terrorists - Criminalisation of computer hacking - New 'hate propaganda' offences
Australia
- Increased police surveillance powers over electronic and telecommunications data - Deployment of military against asylum seekers - Restrictions on legal appeal rights of asylum seekers - Offshore detention camps for asylum seekers - Legal immunities against suit and prosecution for secret services and political police - Offence to identify secret service personnel - Authorisation for intelligence services to spy on Australian citizens overseas
Germany
- New offence of membership of foreign 'terrorist group' - Increased police surveillance powers over electronic data - Ending immunities enjoyed by religious groups - Power for domestic deployment of army
NOTHING TO DO WITH SEPTEMBER 11
The new powers being taken share a pattern. In every country interior and justice ministries insist that these new laws are needed to deal with the 'changed threat' that terrorism represents after September 11. This is not true anywhere, and in the case of the UK at least this claim is deliberately misleading.
The British bill includes some powers that the government has tried to get through parliament before without success, such as widening the arrest powers of the Ministry of Defence police. It also includes powers such as the unrestricted access of police to electronic communication records, which are not restricted to investigations of terrorism. These are simply being introduced 'under cover' of September 11.
Moreover, Home Secretary Blunkett told parliament on 15 October that there was 'no immediate intelligence pointing to a specific threat to the UK'. He has not changed that position. He has now told Labour MPs that the state of emergency that he will formally announce is only a 'technical' state of emergency. 'Technical' because there has to be a state of emergency declared to permit the government to introduce indefinite detention of terrorist suspects under Clause 23 of the Bill without violating the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention allows the government to derogate from its Article 5, which protects the liberty of the person, only on the grounds that there is a national emergency. Technical is one word for it, cynical would be another, but either way the detention power is plainly unrelated to any new terrorist threat. The Australian attorney general has also confessed that his security apparatus has been unable to discover any terrorist targeting of Australia, nor is it clear in what sense Canada and Germany are facing an emergency.
CHILLING THE OPPOSITION IN EXILE
It is worth remembering that anti-terrorism laws have never been effective against determined conspiracies, but they have always served to repress wider political opposition. Two decades of the UK's Prevention of Terrorism Act entirely failed to prevent the actions of the IRA; but then the vast majority of the hundreds of Irish people arrested and detained under its draconian provisions were never charged with anything. Its effect was rather to intimidate political supporters of Irish republicanism in mainland Britain.
It is in this context that the new indefinite detention power of the British and American interior ministries should be seen. Part 4 of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill allows the UK Home Secretary to detain indefinitely any foreigner who has been refused asylum but who cannot lawfully be deported to his country of origin because he would face torture or execution, and so his deportation would violate Article 3 ECHR. It is enough that the Home Secretary 'suspects' that the person is involved with terrorists or has 'links' to others whom the Home Secretary suspects of being terrorists. This power is very wide ranging indeed. When combined with the very broad and vague definition of terrorism already legally enacted in the Terrorism Act 2000, the new power means that the Home Secretary can detain indefinitely any foreign citizen who is a critic of a regime which the British government supports, but which routinely persecutes its political opponents.
The trend in Britain, which leads the world in this respect, is towards the criminalisation of all unauthorised exile political activity. The Terrorism Act already allows the Home Secretary to designate certain organisations as terrorist groups. Under the act it is a criminal offence to be a member of or raise funds for or assist in any way such an organisation. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), for example, is one of the organisations that have been proscribed under the act. Apart from being the largest of the groups resisting decades of oppression of the Kurds by NATO member Turkey, the PKK is the dominant organisation among Kurdish exiles living in Britain and one of the largest political parties in Europe.
The new offence of incitement of religious hatred is also a political weapon. Although widely criticised as a sop to Muslim sensitivities, its most likely initial victims will be Islamists. Muslim activists are already facing prosecution under the UK's existing race discrimination laws for criticising Israel.
This repressive trend appears to have gained more legal authority following the October decision by the House of Lords in the case of Rehman, a Muslim cleric whom the government wished to deport to India. In this case, the UK's highest court endorsed a concept of the 'interests of national security' that includes threats towards other states. The 'interests of national security' is now a means to suppress the political organisation of people exiled in the West who represent no threat to the life of the UK or to the British state.
BOTH TOO LITTLE AND TOO MUCH
The contemporary trend for repressive legislation will doubtless be used as a weapon against political dissent from the Western order. Many Muslims from the Middle East already languish in British jails, for example, where they fill the cells previously occupied by Irish prisoners. However, this is not the primary reason for the new bill's introduction.
Devoid of moral purpose, contemporary governments can only present themselves as the protector of people from perceived threats to their safety. Removing a few more civil liberties backed up by a lot of drama queenery about states of emergency is a cheap and easy means to keep up this posturing. The new powers are pure overkill from the security point of view; their primary purpose is to maintain the very sense of emergency they invoke. Governments are exploiting the anxieties of fearful populations, but they lack the confidence to mobilise their populations in any way. Passing new repressive laws is a cowardly substitute for taking any action in which their purported 'defence of civilisation' might make any immediate demands upon the mass of the people.
In this way politicians are lazily demolishing the protections from arbitrary and despotic government which took the people of Europe and America centuries to win. Leave aside the unrestricted police access to electronic communications records, the duty to inform the authorities and all the rest. The US and British governments are reintroducing indefinite detention at the whim of the interior minister; we should not be reassured that there is no immediate reason for using it against more than a few people.
WHO ARE THE DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM?
Human rights lawyers are up in arms about the way that governments are trying to limit, or even to oust completely, the judiciary from any role in reviewing the exercise of the new powers such as detention orders or police search of electronic data. David Blunkett has retorted that it has always been politicians and not judges who have fought for political freedom. Blunkett's hypocrisy is transparent, but what he says is true. With a few honourable exceptions, the judiciary have always been deferential to state power when it came to the civil liberties crunch (the House of Lords decision in Rehman being only the latest example).
However since the desegregation rulings in the 1950s, the American radicals have looked to the Supreme Court to defend the values it thought were important. More recently the British judiciary have staked their claim as the defender of individual rights by means of the Human Rights Act. But taking the case for freedom into the courts and out of electoral politics has left the Blunketts in charge of the politics and reduced civil liberties in the public mind to a special interest promoted by crooked lawyers.
Western governments say that they are trying to defend the freedom and the rule of law which terrorists are trying to destroy. But introducing indefinite detention on the grounds of executive 'suspicion' in order to uphold the rule of law is like burning the village in order to save it. The security clampdown exposes the claim of the West to be the defender of freedom and civilisation as a fake.
-- James Heartfield