Cameron plans to seize suspects' passports in response to terrorist threat

[flamingdem]

Source: Guardian


David Cameron announced plans to introduce new powers to strip terrorist suspects of their passports to tackle a "greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before".

In a hastily convened press conference at Downing Street, the prime minister said he would announce legislation to deal with the security threat posed by homegrown militants.

The measures, set to be announced in the Commons on Monday, would be the first new counter-terrorism powers to be introduced since Islamic State (Isis) militants took hold of large swaths of Syria and moved into Iraq.

Cameron said urgent action was needed to address the "poisonous narrative of Islamist extremism" and specifically Isis, a terrorist group he said was planning to establish a state on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/29/cameron-seize-passports-terror-threats

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Seize them leaving or upon reentering?

[woodsprite]

1. Is he making a power grab like the PNAC cabal? n/t

[Prophet 451]

2. Key word: "suspects"

In other words, these people have not been tried or convicted of terrorism yet, they've simply been in some way associated with Islamism by our government. I question whether this is even legal under the ECHR.

[flamingdem]

3. Mistakes will be made

I don't know how much this action has to do with pressure from right wing parties like Ukip.

[davidpdx]

4. It says homegrown

So it would be dealing with British citizens. My guess is both.

The issue would then be, what would happen with those British citizens who have a second passport (either EU or through citizenship in another country). Can they take non-British passports?

[Tarheel_Dem]

5. Sounds like profiling to me, and I'm sure there will be much backlash, but what are the options?

[suffragette]

6. More than that. They are using this as an opportunity to try to change basic rights

All this, without any evidence that it will actually be helpful or even that the 'threat' is understood or somehow different than other threats before.

Even a conservative counter terrorism expert is cautioning against the 'rush' to do this.



Former MI6 counter-terrorism chief warns against rush to overhaul UK laws

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/25/counter-terrorism-laws-warning-mi6-chief

Britain should resist a rush to overhaul its fundamental legal principles in the face of an "unproven threat" from homegrown militants fighting in Syria and Iraq, the former global counter-terrorism director of MI6 has said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Richard Barrett criticised government plans for new laws to tackle British extremists and warned against Boris Johnson's suggestion that Britons who travel to Iraq or Syria should be presumed guilty of involvement in terrorism unless they can prove their innocence.

"This fundamental tenet of British justice should not be changed even in a minor way for this unproven threat – and it is an unproven threat at the moment," Barrett said.

In a newspaper column described as "draconian" by the former attorney general, Johnson called for British jihadists to lose their citizenship, proposed the return of control orders and urged David Cameron to intervene against Islamic State (Isis) militarily.

[flamingdem]

7. Interesting. There should be a debate

about how to deal with the issue. Otherwise it is a political football and Cameron is trying to survive by "doing something". In the meanwhile they haven't identified the beheader and thus don't even know for sure if he's British!

[suffragette]

8. Agree about the debate. Looks like it's already political football.

Apparently they had anti-terrorism laws which were ruled "incompatible with European human rights laws" in 2004.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1479156/Terror-suspects-win-Lords-appeal-against-detention.html

The new proposals sound similar and would have similar issues.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/29/counter-terrorism-legislation-hands-tied

But as Cameron knows too well, there are problems, political and legal, with nearly all the proposals. The confiscation of passports, for example, was one of the 12 points proposed by Blair in 2005.

As the government's lawyers have undoubtedly made clear to the prime minister, if you start depriving UK-born citizens of their passports, you breach international laws by making your own citizens stateless. The government may already have gone as far as it can down this road.

A home secretary can deprive somebody who has dual nationality of their British passport if it is "conducive to the public good" and if they have behaved in a way that is "seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK". Earlier this year this was extended to those who had become naturalised, but not without a fight in the House of Lords with peers concerned about statelessness. To go further now, as Cameron has indicated, would be to risk a renewed battle in the Lords and a possible declaration of illegality by the courts.

May has been similarly warned in Whitehall that her moves against extremist groups raise serious freedom of speech issues.



Timing is interesting as well. Looks like they had replaced the laws which were struck down with something called TPIMS. Since these had to do with close monitoring of people who were suspected but not accused, they had expiration dates and they all expired by somtime around January and some politicians had been calling for more and harsher measures without expiration already. Looks to me like many of them are pushing something they already wanted by tying it to the new threat and, yet again, saying that civil rights must be reduced for perceived safety. Reminds me of Patriot Act measures.

[flamingdem]

9. I think the public is demanding they do something so laws might be changed

and they'll end up jailing people as an immediate solution. Of course the prisons are a recruiting haven for groups like Isis.

Just hearing that 250 have returned to Britain after fighting with Isis. Thus the crazed headlines in London today about "Worst Terrorist Threat to UK".

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. Paddy Ashdown slams 'kneejerk' Tory response to jihadi terror threat

The former Liberal Democrat leader and former high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, writing in the Observer, also criticises David Cameron for ill-judged rhetoric that he says could alienate ordinary Muslims and hamper the battle to defeat jihadis.
...
While not attempting to deny or play down the threat from jihadis returning to the UK, Ashdown says that the threat level in Northern Ireland has also been "severe" for the past four years, as it was in all of Britain for much of the 1980s and 1990s when the IRA posed the greatest danger.

He argues that the current threat is "one we have faced before and one we know how to deal with – effectively, without panic and without a whole new range of executive powers which could endanger our liberties.
...
In terms that are bound to anger many Tories, he says that after the threat level was increased, senior Conservatives "from the prime minister downwards … took to every available airwave to tell us how frightened we should be and why this required a range of new powers for them to exercise".

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/30/paddy-ashdown-kneejerk-reaction-jihadi-threat