No right to trial for 10 terror suspects

Men can be detained indefinitely, judges rule

Audrey Gillan
Thursday October 30, 2003
The Guardian

Ten men believed by the government to be international terrorists yesterday lost their appeal against detention without charge or trial.

The men, most of whom have been held in high security prisons or mental hospitals since December 2001, said they now expected to be locked up for the rest of their lives. All deny connections to terrorism.

After the dismissal of the cases by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), a lawyer for the men told a panel of three judges: "Secrecy has been chosen over due process and is a dangerous precedent for the future, not just for these detainees. Their arrest and continuing detention without due process marks the entry of this country into a new dark age of injustice."

The judgment considered whether evidence might have been extracted from people who were tortured and ruled that if it had, it would not necessarily be dismissed by the court. Human rights campaigners have been outraged at the possibility that Britain would accept such evidence and that the home secretary would have relied on it.

David Blunkett alleges that the 10 men, all foreign nationals, were connected to groups linked to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

The judges said there was "sound material" to back up the assessment that they were a risk to national security. The case against one, Jamal Ajouaou, a Moroccan citizen who has returned home, was considered "compelling".

Another detainee, known as "D", was described as a "practised and accomplished liar" whose attempts to distance himself from other terror suspects could not be believed.

Mr Blunkett welcomed the decision. "These determinations send a clear signal to international terrorists that the UK is a very difficult place for them to plan terrorist attacks, whether from here or from abroad," he said.

Open and secret evidence was presented to the SIAC court, some of it from security service witnesses. The men were not allowed to know the nature of the secret evidence against them.

In their statement yesterday the judges criticised two MI5 terrorism experts, saying they were often too quick to draw conclusions or inferences in assessments, and that they did not have "detailed knowledge" of the political background in Algeria or Egypt or of various terror groups.

"But that did not diminish their evidence to our mind," it went on. "Witness A [an MI5 officer] was surprisingly unaware of the detail of common and public allegations about ill treatment in Guantanamo Bay."

The 10 men were interned under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act, which came into force two months after the September 11 atrocities.

The government only had to prove it had "reasonable grounds to suspect" that the men were linked with terrorism and has admitted that the evidence would not stand up in a proper court of law.

The judgment said that "the standard of proof is below a balance of probabilities" but this was because of the nature of the risk facing the UK.

Gareth Peirce, the solicitor acting for eight of the men, criticised the "deference" shown to the security services and the government.

"The same political agenda that created weapons of mass destruction and claimed there was an immediate threat to this country has created a wish to find danger from the presence in this country of these appellants," she said.

Amnesty International said that the judgment was a "perversion of justice".

A spokesman said: "The shockingly low burden of proof, which the SIAC ruled that the secretary of state had met, violates the right to the presumption of innocence."