Terrorist rights in the UK, deportation not an option

Melanie Phillips:

The primary duty of any government is to protect its citizens. In any normal society, people who are thought to be dangerous are jailed. Those suspected of terrorist leanings are either locked up or, if they are foreign nationals, thrown out of the country.

But not in Britain. Some of the foreign terrorist suspects are not locked up at all. Instead, the Government allows them to remain in their homes under ‘control orders’. And then it loses them.

Two days ago, three terrorist suspects absconded while under such control orders and are now on the run. We now learn that ’solid intelligence’ indicated that the three absconders intended to blow up British and other Allied troops abroad.

This brings to a total of six the number of terror suspects whom the British security authorities have managed to lose while the subject of control orders.

The system is a farcical shambles. Even worse, the Home Office tried to keep these earlier disappearances secret. We know about this latest triple flight only because the police insisted that the public should be informed of these men’s identities.

It appears that these three men were able to abscond because they were required to do no more than surrender their passports and report to a telephone monitoring company or to the police.

As for why the men weren’t subject to more stringent restrictions, the answer was that they didn’t pose a direct threat to Britain.

But in that case, why were they on a control order at all?

It is surely common sense to acknowledge that, if people are believed to pose a terrorist threat to Britons abroad, they are quite likely to pose a threat to Britons at home too.

The idea that, just because there was only ’solid intelligence’ about their intention to kill Britons abroad it followed that they posed no threat to Britain itself, is simply absurd.

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But the courts have interpreted human rights law so perversely that they say no one can be deported to a country which doesn’t uphold human rights. Since, according to their criteria, that rules out just about everywhere, that makes deportation all but impossible.

As a result, the Government decided to lock up foreign terror suspects instead. But then human rights law wouldn’t permit that either.

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The truth is that this country cannot fight the mortal threat posed by Islamist terrorism in this way. We should derogate from the Convention or else come out of it altogether.

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The Europeans have adopted a human rights law that has been turned into the terrorist best friend. It is now mainly a terrorist rights law. It is not as if th UK was abusing human rights before they adopted this nonsense. The UK is the birthplace of many of the concepts of human rights and does not need this treaty to know how to deal fairly with its people and this treaty is letting those who want to kill its citizens run free.