http://kingsofwar.org.uk/
Today the UK government is beginning a full court press to legitimise secret trials for people suspected of terrorist offences. Chris Grayling MP, the justice secretary, went on Radio 4 to defend the need for secret trials in ‘very, very rare’ circumstances. We can trust the government in this matter, because ‘very, very rare’ circumstances are likely to stay ‘very, very rare’ when political circumstances change. Take, for example, depriving UK citizens of their British citizenship. As recent reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism demonstrates, we have nothing to worry about. Between the 2002 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act, and 2010, when the Labour Government was kicked out of office, the extraordinary step of stripping a dual national of British citizenship was used at least three times: once against Abu Hamza, once to strip David Hicks of his UK citizenship after he had already been to court to get it, and lastly Hilal al-Jedda, a man made stateless by then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. Since the ascent of Cameron and Clegg, the UK Government has stripped at least fifty people of British citizenship. Law designed with Hamza in mind now allows the Home Secretary to wash the UK’s hands of anyone the government deems undesirable, and in doing so, frees the government from pesky human rights obligations owed to British citizens. Some of those citizens end up dead, by American hands, shortly after such citizenship-stripping has taken place.
Let’s not kid ourselves: some of the people deprived of UK citizenship are (or were) probably very dangerous individuals, as are many people taken to court on terrorism-related offences. But are these measures to ‘combat’ terrorism worth the damage that they do to British society? I can see the need for changing particular laws to take account of new threats to society (people willing to blow themselves up, people willing to conduct mass casualty attacks), but I can’t, for the life of me, see how two men warrant the sacrifice of a basic principle of English law. Secret trials make sense when one views the legal system in terms of ‘output’ and ‘efficiency’ and ‘performance’, but make no sense at all when one considers the values of accountability and democracy that are meant to underpin them. In war time, most states adopt some form of emergency measures for security, but the British government is studious in stating that ‘we’ are not at war with terrorists, no matter how much they consider themselves to be at war with us. That makes the introduction of secret trials for terrorist suspects all the more dangerous, because it will become the new ‘normal’ in short order. After all, if this is done on the government’s say-so, and there is no-one else allowed to observe the case or proceedings, then who will be able to argue against it? This, I think, is how the terrorists win: they make British society so afraid of two people that we’re willing to sacrifice the basic principles of justice in the UK in order to lock them away for a while. These men are so scary, in fact, that the government can’t tell us anything about them, for our own good.
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