Belmarsh, control orders, deportation and extradition

“Now people are dying we’ve got nothing else to live for. What needs to happen is for the killing to stop. But that won’t happen until he [Gaddafi] is out. We just want to be able to live like human beings. Nothing will happen until protests really kick off in Tripoli, the capital. It’s like […]

On Wednesday, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, informed the House of Commons about the results of the government’s extensive counter-terrorism review,  overseen by Ken Macdonald QC (Lord Macdonald), whose report, and the government’s response, is available here. The review confirms that, on many grounds, the government has, as promised, decided to defend aspects of civil […]

With fortunate timing, an event is taking place tonight at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in London, which sheds light on an unjust, but largely unexplored corner of the government’s counter-terrorism policies that was not mentioned in the policy changes announced yesterday by Home Secretary Theresa May. As I explain in a separate article […]

A month ago, I wrote an article exploring how fault lines were opening up in the coalition government regarding control orders, a form of house arrest, depriving alleged “terror suspects” of most of their liberties on the basis of secret evidence, and without ever being charged or tried — or, for that matter, ever being […]

Well, well. I’m not holding my breath, but the Observer‘s announcement on Sunday that “The scrapping of control orders for terror suspects moved a step closer last night when … senior Whitehall security sources broke ranks to reveal that MI5 was ‘not wedded’ to keeping the contentious regime” is promising. A form of virtual house […]

I was in the United States, campaigning against torture as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, when a new book of essays by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice, was published in the UK. In these essays, originally published in the London […]

Since the General Election in May, when the Liberal Democrats formed an unlikely alliance with the Tories, cracks in the coalition have been kept to a minimum, although this, hopefully, is about to change. The battleground is not, sadly, the all-out and ill-conceived assault on the poor unleashed in George Osborne’s smug and cruel comprehensive […]

Time will tell if Labour’s new leader, Ed Miliband, is a genuine force for change, but I was impressed during his campaign that he so clearly recognized that the Labour Party had failed and that criticizing the electorate was both insulting and counter-productive. In an interview with the Guardian in August, for example, he stated, […]

The following interview with Faraj Hassan Alsaadi was conducted by Cageprisoners and published in August 2007, and I’m cross-posting it in memory of Faraj, who died in a motorbike accident on August 16. Imprisoned without charge or trial, or held under a control order, from May 2002 until December 2009, when his control order was […]

As I sit here trying to come to terms with the death of Faraj Hassan Alsaadi, who died in a motorbike accident on August 16, it seems to me that nothing can throw us as much as an unexpected death. In Faraj’s case, it is deeply distressing that he leaves behind a wife and three […]