Comment: A stampede against justice
01 January 2005
In a plea to parliamentarians, lawyer Gareth Peirce spells out the dangers of control orders
This week, our future and our liberties are in your hands. We cannot forgive you if you betray us, and you betray us if you compromise. You betray us if you do not see the excesses of a totalitarian state in what you are asked to endorse.
Any person who has a control order imposed upon him is from that moment branded, forever, as an individual "involved in terrorism-related activity". He can never disprove that label as he will never be told why the order is being made against him. And not only is the man or woman who becomes the subject of the order branded, so too are their entire family, their friends and associates. The children of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa speak of the scars that still remain because they grew up, just as much as their parents, under house arrest.
The children and grandchildren of those witch-hunted by McCarthy in 1950s America lived thereafter branded as the families of traitors. And before we have even had the opportunity to cure the serious mental illnesses caused not just in the men detained under the 2001 act, but in their families also, we are being plunged into new nightmares, unconscious of the lessons of history.
In order not to frighten parliamentarians, it is at present claimed that control orders do not require any individual to remain in his home 24 hours a day. In every fundamental way, however, his life can be destroyed. If he disobeys any aspect of an order, he will be imprisoned. He can be prohibited from possessing specified articles, he can be prohibited from specified activities, he can be restricted "in respect of his work or his business", he can be restricted in his association with specified persons or, open-endedly, "with other persons generally". He can be restricted as to where he lives or who lives with him, where he goes and when. He will be required to give access to "specified persons", to allow those persons to search his place at any time of day or night, to be tagged, to comply with his movements and communications being monitored and, chillingly, to provide information to a specified person if demanded.
We remember the requirement imposed upon hundreds of Americans by McCarthy to provide information on demand, and the heroic stance of those who took the fifth amendment and were sent to prison. "Naming names" will be the order of the day here in just the same way; the individual will be branded, and then, on pain of imprisonment, be required to brand others. Anyone from the Muslim community in Britain, or who has any knowledge of their experience, will have heard the terrified reports, in particular of those who have no safe immigration status, of being repeatedly approached - outside their homes, in supermarkets, with their children - by intelligence agents to provide "information" in exchange for regularisation of their immigration status or face the consequences if they refuse.
Can future recipients of control orders anticipate them and modify their behaviour accordingly? Based upon the experiences of those detained under the 2001 act, the answer is firmly no. Far from becoming clearer with time, those detained are, after three years, even more confused as to the basis for their detention. What is asserted by the home secretary in March 2005, in relation to each detainee to justify his continuing detention, is that each remains wedded to his extremist jihad ideals. How can this assessment have been made? Of those about whom it is made, three are in Broadmoor hospital and have had access only to their doctors (who proffer their view that no such ideas or behaviour have ever been manifested throughout the years they have been there). Another, driven into madness and under house arrest has had no visitors or communication with anyone other than his wife, children and lawyers for nearly a year. The others, all in Woodhill or Belmarsh, have