And I thought the PATRIOT Act military tribunals were draconian.
The Scotsman - Top Stories - Blunkett plans secret terror trials: DAVID Blunkett, the Home Secretary, aims to bring in controversial new laws introducing pre-emptive trials for Britons suspected of international terrorism, it will be announced today. The threat from suicide bombers was now so great that the burden of proof in British courts may have to be lowered in terrorism cases, so that extremists can be tried before they succeed in mounting an attack, Mr Blunkett argues. Proposals allowing British terror suspects to be tried at least partly in secret by a security vetted judge will be put forward in a discussion paper soon. Mr Blunkett hopes to "address the issues before the general election". The proposal would effectively create a hybrid between the existing trial system and emergency powers which have so far allowed internment of 16 foreign terror suspects on evidence which is tested in secret. Evidence in the new trials would even have to be kept secret from the defendants themselves to protect MI5, MI6 and GCHQ sources, he said. The contentious move could allow prosecutors to take action against extremist figures where evidence was not strong enough to win a conviction under existing court rules. "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," said Mr Blunkett.
So basically, the British position would be, "Well, we don't really have the evidence to convict you, but we think you're guilty, so we're going to create a special kangaroo court that will convict you just because we say so. We're not going to tell everyone what our evidence is, and we may not tell anyone that the trial is even taking place."
If they're doing this to defend their way of life, their democratic process ... then why bother?
This is the point that continually baffles me, both here and there. No, our written Constitution nor Britain's unwritten constitution need not constitute a mass suicide pact. That said, the principles embodied therein have to mean something. They can't just be words on paper (or in ether, in their case) that mean what we want them to mean until we get a little widgetty, for whatever reason. There must be some sort of balance that allows the government to do what it can to keep people safe without resorting to arbitrary dictatorship, which seems to be happening more and more in both countries.
The plain fact is, one of the costs of having an open society is that extremists will commit violent acts against people. For some reason, this doesn't seem to be a cost that we're willing to bear. At the same time, we're perfectly sanguine (in the most literal sense) to bear the costs of a society in which person-to-person violence kills more in a given year than we've ever lost to terrorism; there were 16,204 murders reported in 2002 in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. It's understandable that the prospect of mass murders is terrifying. Somehow, we have to come to grips with the fact that it's possible, that despite our best efforts it will happen, and that we need somehow not to lose our minds when it does.
Posted by iain at February 02, 2004 12:46 PM
