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UK terror law push denounced

Plans for a major extension of Britain's anti-terror laws floated by UK Home Secretary David Blunkett provoked widespread condemnation from lawyers and civil liberties groups on Monday.

Blunkett is considering consulting on measures which would include allowing British terror suspects to be tried at least partly in secret, with convictions reached on evidence from security and intelligence sources, rather than through traditional policing routes.

Sensitive evidence could be kept secret even from defendants and their lawyers, while state-appointed special advocates would protect defendants' interests.

The standard of proof could be lowered from the criminal standard of "beyond reasonable doubt" to "the balance of probabilities," meaning the defendant was more likely guilty than not.

"Pre-emptive" action could be taken before suicide bombers had a chance to carry out their plans.

The Labour peer Helena Kennedy described Blunkett as a "shameless authoritarian" and called his ideas "an affront to the rule of law." She compared him to the Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe. His debate on the issue was "a classic Blunkett tactic," she told BBC Radio 4's Today program.

"You suggest all kinds of outrageous and awful things because then you get away with half of them," she said.

"But all of this is terrible and even half of it would be a disgrace," she said.

She said it was particularly untimely to propose convicting people on the basis of intelligence material at a time when such security services were coming under criticism for failures in Iraq.

Stephen Irwin, chairman of the bar, said: "No one should contemplate changing the standard of proof or trying people in secret, unless everything else has been tried, and we are still failing to convict terrorists. We have not tried everything.

"For example, government does not use evidence from intercepts in court. The last thing we should do is to risk generating more terrorists from within our own country by creating grievances," he said.

Mark Littlewood of the civil rights group Liberty said: "Simply introducing more laws, greater powers and stiffer penalties will go a long way to undermining British justice and will not make our country any safer."

Neil Durkin of Amnesty International UK said: "What is particularly worrying is the suggestion that there might be some wider introduction of internment-like measures that have already created a small-scale Guantanamo Bay in our own backyard by imprisoning 14 foreign nationals without charge or trial."

Blunkett, outlining his thoughts during a visit to India, said: "I think we need to debate how we can amalgamate the Terrorism Act 2000 and the 2001 terrorism legislation and deal with these delicate issues of proportionality and human rights on the one hand and evidential base and the threshold of evidence on the other.

"That is quite a challenge because we are having to say that the nature of what people obtain through the security and intelligence route is different to the evidence gained through the policing route," he said.
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