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."

Comments

Re:With two words, I destroy your argument

[Space cowboy]

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.

Re:At least...

[meringuoid]

Correct, but, well, some of those convictions were for trivial offences like fruit stealing.

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.

Re:At least...

[sTalking_Goat]

Only barbarians would ship their alleged criminals to some overseas outpost then claim they had no recourse to the laws of the country...

You're right. Austrailians would never do anything like that

Re:it's without CHARGE, not without trial

[polar red]

, it seems rather, well, moderate. WHAT ??? Such laws are the BASIS of a dicatorship. You can be jailed for NO REASON, without compensation, for 42 days ! In my country, you have to be charged with anything, before 24 hours are passed after you have been taken from the street. This law gives too much power to the police.

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

[jimicus]

However there are still 315 people who really should be held for 28 days without charge. Are there enough truely patriotic police to do this though. You jest, but I don't think your average MP understands the seriousness of the matter. S/he gets wrongly held for 28 days, then at the end of it they go back to whatever it was they were doing and there's no harm done.

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.

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

[meringuoid]

"have an unelected monarch who is a militaristic nutter pissing around in America largely out of spite and who then descends into mental illness but you can't get rid of him because he claims to be appointed by a god"

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.

Remember the Guildford Four / Maguire Seven?

[DoctorFrog]

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.