Rolled-up Trousers

Can war criminals be arrested in Scotland?

While the London government makes preparations to curtail the ability of courts to pursue war criminals, there has been no discussion of what this means to the Scottish legal system.

On first glance it may appear relatively simple. It is the UK government which has signed up to the relevant international treaties, so theoretically they run the show. They are not likely to be advocating withdrawing from international treaties though.

What the proposal from London is expected to be is that magistrates can no longer issue arrest warrants, and instead the Attorney General has veto, so that he can take into account political interests. Her equivalent in Scotland is the Lord Advocate who could take a different view on these matters.

Arrest warrants till now have been issued under the Criminal Justice Act 1988. This only though applies in England and Wales. What may be relevant in this regard instead in Scotland is Schedule 5 of the Scotland Act:

"observing and implementing international obligations, obligations under the Human Rights Convention, and obligations under community law."

If this is not considered encompassing though, the Scottish Parliament could theoretically legislate for it as criminal justice is a devolved matter. There then is the question of whether Scottish courts could bear the universal jursidiction of a war crimes trial. My understanding is that the position on this is unclear.

I'm not a lawyer, and my aim here is to kickstart a debate and get people thinking. If my analysis is correct, the Scottish position could do with tightening up on war crimes and it would be good to see that happen.

UPDATE: Craig Murray calls for the Lord Advocate to publish her opinion on the legality of the Iraq war, while Bill Wilson and a group of SNP MSPs begin action to have Tony Blair prosecuted in Scotland.

ID card scheme has not been scrapped

Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for Gordon Brown. The prime minister is said to have got quite tetchy with some reporters yesterday. Understandably so given how bold the press corps seem to be with him now. We're not used to this kind of lack of deference to a prime minister. I'm not sure it was even like this with John Major.

Brown was named World Statesman of the Year last week. Instead, the press focused on the lack of a one-to-one meeting between him and Barack Obama. On Sunday, Andrew Marr asked him about his health and taking pills. This is a sure sign of lack of authority. Tony Blair actually had to be admitted to hospital with heart problems in 2003 and no one made a big deal out of it.

Listening to Brown's speech at the Labour conference though, the feelings of sympathy quickly pass. The spin on his ID cards announcement particularly leaped out for me. He said "And so, conference, I can say to you today: in the next parliament, there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens." This wasn't a new announcement. And it isn't the whole truth either.

42 days later

There seems to be some despondency amongst activists regarding the 42 days result, the cynicism of the DUP, and the betrayal of some on the Labour benches who said they would rebel only for them to lose their spines at the eleventh hour.

Chins up though, this has still to go through the House of Lords, who will hopefully reject it and send it back to the Commons for them to think again. We must all then keep the pressure up.

Home Sec: terror threat "severe" and "growing"

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith appeared in the News of the World this week defending the need for 42 days by 'exclusively' revealing statistics on the level of threat we face. 2,000 individuals are being monitored, 200 networks and 30 active plots.

This all rings a bell, and that is because these are just about the exact figures that MI5 chief, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, released in November 2006. At that time there were 1,600 individuals, 200 networks and 30 active plots.

So in the last one-and-half-years, the good news is that there are no more active plots and networks, and when Smith says the problem is "growing", we'll accept that she means just on the lone individuals front rather than networks and active plots which she also mentioned.

Can we also ask that of these 30 active plots how 'active' are they? Why have these people not been arrested yet?

Control Orders in tatters

Good interview on the BBC website with Cerie Bullivant, who was one of those that absconded a control order last year amidst quite a bit of publicity.

In December he was cleared of breaching the control order and in February, the control order was quashed by the presiding judge.

The judgements surely leave the government's strategy in tatters. Control orders effectively place someone under house arrest when there is not enough evidence to arrest and prosecute them. Given how widely anti-terror powers are defined, this must mean there is very little on them indeed. When the powers were introduced, we were told that this may because evidence was gained from bugging, which was inadmissible in court, or intelligence sources would be compromised.

Stop and Search kept in the news

It was very good of Tom Harris MP to keep Stop and Search in the news last week - here, here, here, here, here, and here for example.

What the Rail Minister was doing though was supporting the British Transport Police's policy of implementing the draconian Terrorism Act powers in Scotland.

None of what Harris has put out has answered the central points though - that stop and search achieves nothing, it is an erosion of basic liberties to stop people without having any suspicion against them, and that more than just being a waste of police time, it is harming relations between communities and police.

14% of stop and searches on ethnic minorities

Astounding statistics were released over the weekend showing that 14% of stop and searches under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in Scotland have been done on people of dark skin. This is despite them forming only 2% of the population.

The Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill has come out strongly against the regime operated by the British Transport Police in the country's railway stations. Since the Glasgow Airport attacks, nearly 15,000 people have been stopped ans searched, around 100 a day.

The issue made the front page of Saturday's Scotsman, although for some reason I can't find it anywhere on their webpage. The Herald also covered it, while you can watch more 10 minutes into the latest programme from the Politics Show (worth watching for the BTP's insistence that no one had complained, but mentioning that the Muslim Council had been invited in to see them last month after complaints - and during that meeting complaints to the BTP from people stopped and searched were mentioned).

HMRC's CDs kill ID

After the unbelievable fiasco of the Her Majesty's Revenue sending out the details of 25million people on a couple of CDs via unrecorded mail, I really hope that any idea of a big computer housing all of our personal details with the ID card scheme is stone dead.

It's one thing for details to be held for a purpose. There is no good reason for ID cards.

Don't believe them

The government's latest wheeze is to seem to offer compromise on extension to detention without trial. The floated ideas (later denied) are:

• detention beyond 28 days could only be triggered in certain prescribed circumstances
• it would require the specific prior authorisation of the home secretary
• in addition it would require judicial approval every 7 days beyond the original 28
• the home secretary would have to notify Parliament and then report back to them after the end of the extended detention
• the power would be time limited - lasting not years but perhaps just weeks or months

If these do turn out to be the government's position, it should be distrusted and rejected by all. Currently 28 days is meant to be subject to judicial review, but there's no doubt in anyone's mind that we have 28 days detention in this country such is the formality it's seen as. The control order legislation was wearily passed through Parliament in 2005 after a promised 'sunset clause' after 12 months, but it was waved through without a whimper after the time limit elapsed. Please, let's not get conned again.

These leaked concessions come after the government seized upon the suggestion by Liberty and others that an extra 30 days detention already exists under law if the government declared a state of emergency. These new proposals are designed to allow the government to take advantage of the additional 30 days without taking the drastic step of declaring an emergency like General Musharraf. Instead, the Home Secretary would just have to say, and then it would be.

28 days, stop and search, ID cards - the continuing civil liberties battles

The arguments over 28 days detention rumble on. The opposition parties are hopelessly on the backfoot on this one. The position should not just be against an increase in 28 days, they should be calling for the limit to come back down. This would be in line with other Western democracies.

In the world of concessions, if you don't adopt a decent bargaining position, then you end up paying a lot more. By arguing that we stay on 28 days, it is inevitable there will be some increase on that. Already the opposition offered up post-charge questioning and the use of intercept evidence as an alternative to increasing the detention limit. The government gobbled these up and still want an increase in pre-charge detention. Whatever the case, sadly Gordon Brown gets what he wants, which is to look tough on the issue, not matter how absurd his proposition is.

On stop and search, these look like continuing indefinitely in Scotland by the British Transport Police. The rationale seems to be that because of the new form of terror, having surveillance of train stations to be on the lookout for suspect packages is not good enough anymore. Now people strap them to themselves or smash in with their cars. By randomly stopping and searching people, the argument goes that our transport network becomes a hostile place for would-be terrorists.

The problem with this analysis is that a would-be bomber would simply have to press a button if stopped by the police while on his way to detonate a bomb. His job would be done. Meanwhile, stop and search is humiliating the disproportionate number of Asian-looking people that are stopped under it, undermining good relations between police and communities which are essential at this moment in time.

Opposition to ID cards continues to grow too, with Baroness Shirley Williams the latest to say she will go to jail rather than carry one.

Black boy with a big mouth

I attended the best public meeting I've been to in a long time last night. It was organised by SACC and Glasgow Stop the War on the issue of civil liberties. They actually called it a few months ago, possibly with sage like precision on what a topical issue it would be right now.  They could not though have predicted how things would be panning out for Aamer Anwar at the moment.

A number of the speakers got standing ovations, including Atif Siddique's brother Asif and Rose Gentle. A member of the audience pointed out that the issue of the war and terrorism were going to continue, not least because so many years in, it is now personally affecting so many families here at home including some of those in attendance.

Simon Jenkins on the MI5 and Queen's Speeches

There can be only two results from this abuse of publicity. One is that the public demotes such scares to wolf-crying and treats them as background noise. The other is that, as all scare stories stereotype communities, the host nation distances itself from whatever group allegedly harbours the threat. The latter in turn retreats and denies the police the intelligence required for public safety. In other words, speeches such as those from the head of MI5 are wholly self-defeating.

...

One question remains. No sensible person has a problem with rounding up suspects for questioning for a limited period. But if Evans and his like claim to "know" 2,000 Britons who are "actively engaged in terrorist-related activities" and pose a "direct threat to national security and public safety", why are these 2,000 still at large? It cannot be for lack of powers, after half a dozen laws enacted to this specific end.

Could it be that headlines about 2,000 terrorists "on the loose as we speak" are more helpful to the government and its agencies than if they were under lock and key in Belmarsh? We should regret the day the secret service stopped being secret and became just another government front organisation.

Comment is Free

Met guilty in De Menezes killing

Just as Al Capone was done for income tax evasion, the Met has been found guilty in the case of Jean Charles De Menezes on health and safety grounds.

Focus has been on calls for Sir Ian Blair to go. This is a diversion surely from the main issue - Operation Kratos. Shoot-to-kill may well be necessary in the case where a bomber is about to pull the trigger. Clearly though, in the case of Jean Charles there was a complete breakdown in identifying who he was, from the moment that an officer decided he had to take a leak, through Ivor following him around the streets and buses of London, and finally to the embraces on the Tube itself.

Aamer Anwar on trial (updated)

This has all got a bit out of hand. Whatever you thought of Aamer Anwar's comments after Atif Siddique's trial, it should not have got this far.

As noted in the Sunday Herald, lawyers in England commonly make such statements after trials. There is as far as I can discern, no rules in Scots law barring this either, with albeit the culture being different.

Anwar has since apologised for not making it clear he was speaking on behalf of his client. To think that he could potentially be disbarred from practicing due to this is contemptuous in itself.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

Stop and Search reintroduced in Glasgow

It's been announced today that police have been engaging in stop and search under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act today on Glasgow's underground and train stations.

I was surprised to first read about it on BBC Online this morning. The first time Section 44 powers were introduced in Scotland was after the Glasgow Airport attack for a limited period of 30 days. Given the circumstances, it wasn't widely questioned at the time, despite there being a less than overwhelming case for the measure.

During that month there were said to have been only a handful of stops carried out. I actually believe that the figure was a fair bit higher - I know of a number of young Muslims that were stopped and searched without the proper documentation being carried out.

Lib Dem leadership rivals pledge civil disobedience on ID cards

[Nick] Clegg offered to lead a "people's campaign" against the controversial measure, adding that he was prepared to be hauled before the courts.

Mr Clegg renewed his passport in May last year to avoid being placed on the new National Identity Register for another 10 years.

He said he would also be asking Lib Dem-controlled councils to ensure no local services required an ID card.

"If the government seeks to make ID cards compulsory on every British citizen, I will lead a people's campaign to thwart the programme," he said.

Airline refuses to fly out forced deportees

The Independent reports that XL Airways are now refusing requests by the government to fly out those being forcibly deported from the country. The final straw was taking out people to Congo:

Now it has emerged that the airline has written to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns confirming its decision to pull out of any further flights. The XL email, sent on 12 September, said: "We had a contract with the Government along with other carriers, for a range of flying. Under this contract we operated one flight in February to DR Congo as part of this contract, without full understanding of the political dimensions involved.

"Our chief executive [Phillip Wyatt] had made it quite clear to all concerned that we will not be operating any further flights of this nature ... We are not neutral on the issue and have sympathy for all dispossessed persons in the world, hence our stance."

This is a very important step and one possibility for action hitherto ignored among the various outrages that have taken place at the behest of the Home Office over the years.

XL should be applauded and hopefully other airlines will follow suit. In the Independent article, BA and Virgin said they had no choice in the matter, only for the Home Office to flatly contradict that. Even if it were the case, that's not good enough from these airlines. Turning a blind eye is complicity.

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More thoughts on the Siddique trial

A number of people this week have been questioning whether Atif Siddique really is a terrorist, quite apart from the legal definition.

As previously noted, there was no plot and no bombs or bullets involved. I think even some of those on the inside came to this conclusion too judging by the leaked details of Siddique's intention, as they put forward, to bomb Canada and to behead their prime minister. This was not presented during the trial, but given to the media by anonymous sources after the verdict. It suggests to me a lack of confidence in the public case for Siddique's guilt. Normally these type of leaks take place after an arrest, not after a conviction.

Turkish PM calls for relaxing of hijab ban

Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkey's universities should lift their ban on hijab, allowing those women that wear it to enter further education.

And not before time. But just a thought - if a state is truly secular, should it even be legislating on religious practice? Wouldn't that be truly keeping religion out of state? Why does the state have the right to interfere in religion, but not vice versa?

Belmarsh detainee Mr OO

Late last week, in a landmark case in the US, Jose Padilla was found guilty of conspiracy to support Islamic terrorism overseas, and will be sentenced in December, probably to life. The original charges of him as at the centre of a dirty bomb plot in the US had disappeared over the years since his arrest in a flurry of publicity in 2002. Last week little media focus was on the fact that after 43 months in solitary confinement in a military brig, including two year when he never saw his lawyers, Mr Padilla had lost his mind. Dr Angela Hegarty, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Colombia, interviewed him for 22 hours, with great difficulty, as he resisted her just as he had resisted his lawyers' attempts to represent him. Her report of what had happened to his mind during this period, when even his name was taken from him and he was called John Doe, is chilling.

Dr Hegarty is the very person needed just now by a Jordanian refugee in Belmarsh prison known as Mr OO.

His story has turned from sad and confusing to positively Kafkaesque. He has spent 20 months in Belmarsh without knowing of what the UK government accuses him, nor why they now want to deport him to Jordan - the very country he fled from 15 years ago, when the UK then accepted him as a refugee.

Read the rest - Victoria Brittain at CiF

Brown on ID cards and 28 days

Gordon Brown yesterday laid out proposals before the House of Commons to bolster our security.

Disappointingly, they do not differ much, if at all, from the Blair years. His "third line of defence" (after border police and biometrics at the border) is the introduction of biometric ID cards by 2009. I thought that that the idea of them as any sort of deterrent to terrorism had been long knocked on the head.

More healdine grabbing was his bid to increase 28 day detention to 56 days. He introducced this in a cunning way. Liberty have been arguing that if longer than 28 day detention is needed, due for example to the number and complexity of suspects, then the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 allows for a national state of emergency to be declared and another 30 days of detention. Brown used this stance as cover to say that he's proposing 28 days without the need for a state of emergency, but with judicial and Parliamentary safeguards instead.

'I took a photo of Tower Bridge and was arested for terrorism'

The next day I was interviewed by police. I was told that I would be charged for possessing a book called Future Jihad, Terrorist Strategies Against The West by Walid Phares, possessing a press ID, using the term Al Qaida in my emails and essays, visiting a number of places in Britain, taking photos of Tower Bridge which show the structure of the bridge, and having pictures of military people.

They concluded that I was acting suspiciously and ‘collecting information for terrorism’. I was told that my Iraqi passport – I am a Kurd from Irbil – added to their suspicion of me. But these charges are unbelievable. I bought the book from my university bookstore for academic reasons – it is widely available ...

Read the rest at Socialist Worker

Blair's human rights

Blair may be leaving office, but I have the sinking feeling he's not going anywhere. He's going to be part of the national body politic for some time to come. Not the move into the serious old age of Thatcher, or to the cricket of Major for him. This is bad news for us all, but none will take it as badly as Gordon Brown I think.

Anyway, Blair's aiming to go out with a bang for now. In an article in the Sunday Times this week he defended control orders:

We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong.

Blair better hope that whenever he comes up against a war crimes tribunal that it doesn't operate on his standard of human rights. For, it could easily be argued at the time that given the nature of the star witnesses, particularly in the security services, that it would be better not to have a trial at all and move straight to sentencing.  But because that wouldn't be entirely fair, we'd just lock him up in his front room with no access to the outside world.

Success

Well done to all who wrote in asking the Glasgow Film Theatre to show Taking Liberties. Here's the response from them:

Thanks to all of you who contacted us about Taking Liberties. GFT is screening the film on 6,7 and 8 July. Times are to be confirmed so please check our website www.gft.org.uk nearer the time. Brochures for July will be available from GFT from 21 June.

So three dates - two more than Edinburgh now!

Taking Liberties

The Taking Liberties film that is coming out next month looks like compulsory viewing. You can see the trailer and there are cinemas across the UK showing it.

However, there are no venues in Glasgow! I've emailed the GFT who, being the city's foremost independent movie house, should consider booking it. You can email them too via this address

Blair: Algeria has a different political system

Robert Fisk after Tony Blair's farewell speech in Sedgefield:

I was struck by all this last month when I came across one of Blair's lies in my local Beirut paper. Sandwiched beneath a headline which read "Saudi reforms lose momentum" - surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press - it quoted our dear Prime Minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians home because their government represented a "different political system". The "foregrounded" element, of course, is the word "different". This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason why the committee declined to return these men to their country was not - as Blair well knew - because Algeria possesses a "different" political system but because the Algerian "system" allows it to torture to death its prisoners.

I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Chateauneuf police station in Algiers - where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died. I still remember the spiteful and abusive letter that the Algerian ambassador to London wrote to The Independent, sneering at Saida Kheroui whose foot was broken under torture. She was a "terrorist", this man announced. This is the "different" political system that Blair was referring to. Ms Kheroui, by the way, never emerged from prison. She was murdered by her torturers.

Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. He knows this. So how does he dare lie about the "different" political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this...

Freshly powdered Al-Qaeda

The Sunday Mail report that the bomb squad was called in over some talcum powder discovered in a Paisley Road West flat owned by Muslims. Some young boys were hauled off for questioning about their alleged membership of Al-Qaeda. They were released a few days later.

The inhumanity of control orders

I'm someone who likes to think that he's pretty plugged into the ins and outs of the erosion in civil liberites over the last few years. I still couldn't help but be taken aback by the footage garnered by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Monday.

Rather than just read about these nameless men who are represented by letters of the alphabet, for the first time we saw their faces, and heard their voices tell their stories. The choice that one had to make in either continuing the sad farce of this government imposed existence indefinitely, or letting his wife and kids get on with their lives by voluntarily sending himself back to Algeria was one that none of us can relate to. Two previous detainees have done precisely this, and no one has heard from them since. As we heard in the programme, the Algerian view on torture is "Of course we do it! What do you think we give them flowers?"