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UK Can Now Hold People Without Charge For 42 Days
the_leander writes "Prime Minister Gordon Brown has narrowly won a House of Commons vote on extending the maximum time police can hold terror suspects to 42 days. There is talk of compensation packages available for the falsely accused. The chances of you getting that money however are slim to none, lets not forget, this is the same country that charges prisoners who have been falsely accused for bed and boarding costs."
Now, the Tories have become the more liberal party like the Dems in the USA and are vehemenetly trying to prevent the degradation of Habeas Corpus principles. The Labor party (which used to be more left-leaning Jimmy Carter type) has turned into a Neocon haven under Blair and Brown.
Well, no, obviously it is *not* the policy of the UK that they can be held for 42 days. It's passed one house, barely. The house entrusted with the duty of rejecting popular but bad laws has yet to rule on it. It's *entirely* within the remit of the house of Lords to reject this out of hand, and it's one of the checks-and-balances that the second house is there to provide...
Abu Ghraib may have been an isolated "incident" (though an awful lot of people would have needed to conveniently ignore what happened there...), but Guantanamo Bay is precisely current US policy.
If you are a citizen in the US, they'll simply fabricate evidence and send you to be tortured in one of the less squeamish regimes that the US has links with (eg: Syria)...
Given the amount of illegal wiretapping, the removal of habeus corpus for non-citizens, the policy of torturing suspected terrorists coupled with the ability of the president to arbitrarily designate someone a terrorist, (I could go on and on...), I find the implications disturbing in the extreme.
I don't agree with the 42 days thing, but I think the glass-houses line really does apply here...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
You might be interested in the Maher Arar case. He was apprehended at Kennedy International Airport and held for 2 weeks, no charges, no lawyer, and no consular representation. And then the US ultimately sent him to Syria to be tortured by proxy.
In particular, many people were transported for stealing food during the Irish famine, when it was literally that or starve to death with your family. As it turned out this wasn't much of a deterrent; in Australia you'd at least be fed.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
True, but why should he have to pay at all? The compensation was for wrongful imprisonment. Are kidnap victims made to pay their kidnappers for board and lodgings? Same principle.
You're right. Austrailians would never do anything like that
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
You or I get held for 28 days - potentially without communication with the outside world, let's not forget that - and when you get out your employer will have given up on you and sought a replacement. Your personnel record will say "Disappeared off the face of the earth one day" - which I'm sure would look just great if an alternate employer contacted them for a reference.
And if you're asked why you left your job - well, I'd love to see the look on the interviewer's face when you say "I was detained under the Terrorism Act and not allowed to contact anyone, so my employer had to find someone else to do the job" but I don't think it's an answer that would do you any favours.
Compensation? What compensation? They'll base compensation on the 28 (or 42) days you were detained, not the repercussions. If the repercussions include "having to sell the house because you can no longer afford it because you lost a £40,000 per year job and had to take a £25,000 per year job", that's your problem.
We did get rid of him. Shut him quietly away and his son took over. Said son did bugger all because he was a lazy fat drunken gluttonous lecherous oxygen thief, so Parliament ran the country. During this period our Empire in Canada was attacked by the United States; in response we invaded and burned Washington to the ground. We were also at war with Napoleon Bonaparte, whose total defeat ushered in a century of British global hegemony. Not bad going, for a country being run while the king's in the loony bin and the regent's in bed with a hangover.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Only if you don't count Iraqis as people. They have lost around 1 million CIVILIANS, which is actually a lot more (per day) than when Saddam was in power.
But seriously I hope the sequence of events goes like this:
1. Brown gets defeated by Cameron at next Election
2. Milliband replaces Brown and learns how to shave
3. Cameron has one term where he learns to become unpopular
4. A labour government which is a bit more principled gets elected.
I'm dubious about whether anyone can be principled in party politics though
Nothing to see here.
Withholding Royal Assent would cause a slight delay and creating a media frenzy. It might be enough to cause some MP's to change their minds, but it would also seriously jeopardize the future of the monarchy.
The way parliament has gotten unfettered power in the UK has been by using the power it did have to hint, threaten or force the monarchs into yielding more and more of their power, and they have not been shy of doing it - the monarchy in the UK is there because the British rather enjoy tradition and because the current monarch is putting on a decent show and not being a bother. If she does start being a bother, it would likely start a process towards the monarchy at the very least being stripped of the last vestiges of influence.
I wrote my MP both before and after this vote pointing out among other things the flagrant abuses of the law already.
He wrote back on the one before the vote telling me that "for security reasons, we cannot share the information that we have that makes this extension a requiement, but we only have the public's best interests at heart". I don't expect a reply to my letter post vote.
I also got both of my neighbors to do the same, and they were quite blown away to learn about http://www.writetothem.com/
Nothing changes and until we learn to make a noise in the streets, the politicians won't listen to us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four
As it happens I rewatched the Daniel Day movie In The Name Of The Father a short time back. It's odd to see, and recall from real life, the aghast reactions to the "Prevention of Terrorism Act" which gave UK police the unprecedented (and almost immediately abused) power to hold suspects without charge for an entire week - 7 days.
That was long enough to obtain at least 11 false convictions pretty much straight away. The modern UK police must be softies, if it takes them six times as long to extract a confession from whomever they decide to detain.
The hereditary peers were mostly just old members of the British aristocracy whose great great great granddad had done something that amassed them huge amounts of wealth, probably at the expense of the common British people of the time. Those that did not get rich by screwing the common British people got rich by screwing the common people in foreign lands and built us an empire instead.
I know that the House of Lord performs a valuable function as a check on the power of parliament and often prevents ridiculous laws from being rushed through on a wave of hysteria whipped up by the press, however it can do that just as well without being full of people whose only contribution to modern society is being vastly rich. The House of Lords as it now stands is mostly full of retired politicians, senior lawyers and a few remaining hereditary peers so I think performs its function much better than it used to.
I dont read