Britain Proposes Wide Restrictions on Those Deemed a Threat

The government Wednesday unveiled a sweeping set of proposals restricting the activities of anyone in Britain deemed to pose a strong terrorist threat.

Detailed in Parliament by Home Secretary Charles Clarke, the measures may include putting electronic tags on suspects, curfews, house arrests and bans on the use of telephones or the Internet.

Under the proposals, it would not be necessary to charge the suspects or prove they had committed a crime. Clarke said the controls could be applied by the Home Office to British citizens as well as foreigners in the country.

Human rights advocates were swift to voice objections. Some suggested that the proposed powers threatened Britain’s centuries-old tradition of habeas corpus, which allows detainees to file court action claiming that they are being held in violation of law.

The plan was revealed hours before police freed four former inmates of the U.S.-run prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The four, who had been labeled “enemy combatants” during three years in U.S. custody, were returned to Britain on Tuesday.

Their release Wednesday night was an apparent admission that Britain had no evidence of wrongdoing that could justify their further detention.

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government says it has been trying to find a solution to protect the public from suspected terrorists when there is not enough legally admissible evidence to arrest them.

In December, the Law Lords, Britain’s highest judicial body, cited international conventions in invalidating a section of the country’s 2001 anti-terrorism law that permitted indefinite detention of suspected foreign terrorists who could not be deported to their home countries.

Twelve such suspects are being held at London’s Belmarsh Prison and another facility, and the government says it needs new tools if they can no longer be incarcerated.

Under Clarke’s proposal, such suspects could be placed under closely monitored house arrest, and they could be arrested if they attempted to evade the controls.

The home secretary said he was also working on a plan to deport at least some of the 12 to their home countries, on condition that Britain received guarantees from those nations that they would not face execution.

The government says it believes the terrorism suspects pose a serious threat to national security, but it cannot present evidence in the courts without compromising sensitive intelligence operations. Clarke said none would be released into British society before the new system of controls is enacted because “there remains a public emergency threatening the life of the nation.”

Parliament members gave a mixed response to the announcement.

“Most people with a few exceptions acknowledge that it is a ... difficult problem,” said Clive Soley, a prominent Labor Party member of Parliament.

But he noted that preventive detentions were not unprecedented, and had been imposed on Germans in Britain in the late 1930s and on terrorism suspects in Northern Ireland more recently.

“So there is always this problem, particularly with terrorism. I don’t think anybody is happy with the solution. On the other hand, nobody’s got anything better to say,” he said.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said the government was simply trading one human rights violation for another when it proposed ending the Belmarsh Prison detentions and putting the men under house arrest.

“Adherence to the rule of law should not be a game of cat and mouse,” she said.

Lord David Howell, a Conservative member of the House of Lords, said he was among the members of the upper house upset by the government’s “radical” proposal and was eager to ensure that the country’s traditional liberties be preserved.

Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, one of the lawyers for the former Guantanamo inmates, said the proposals amounted to a “further abuse of human rights in Britain.”

“I hope we, the British people, say no -- we have had enough,” he told Britain’s Press Assn.