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British anti-terror laws under fire as two terror suspects escape
LONDON - Britain’s anti-terrorism legislation came under renewed fire Tuesday as a row over two international terrorist suspects who have gone on the run intensified. Opposition parties and pressure groups said that the escape of the pair, reportedly a Briton of Pakistani descent and an Iraqi, highlighted that the control orders to which they were subject were dangerous and unfair.

Control orders are a loose kind of house arrest which usually compel suspects to report regularly to police and place them under a curfew, although critics say suspects should instead be charged and face a trial.

But Home Office minister Tony McNulty hinted Monday that the government may go in a different direction and diverge from the European Convention on Human Rights to tighten up the regime using existing legislation. “We’ve got scope... to look at derogating orders that actually step away from the European Convention on Human Rights. That remains an option and we keep these things under review,” he told BBC television.
Good luck with that Tony, you're in Labour, remember?
And, with a note of irritation in his voice, Prime Minister Tony Blair reminded reporters at his monthly press conference that the government had tried to bring in tougher anti-terrorism powers but was defeated on the issue. “We were prevented by opposition in parliament and then by the courts in ensuring that that was done,” he said.
Join the club, ask Dubya how it feels.
“Control orders were never going to be as effective as detention but of course, we’ve got to make sure that if someone breaches their control order, they’re properly sought after.”

The Home Office has not made public any details of the escapes, but the BBC reported on its website that one of the fugitives was a British man of Pakistani descent suspected of wanting to go to Iraq and fight against the United States and British-led coalition there. He is 25 and escaped from the mental health unit of a hospital in south-west London in the last few weeks, Britain’s Press Association (PA) reported.

The other man is Iraqi and is thought to have been missing for some months, the BBC online said.
Wanna bet he's in either Anbar or Peshawar?
Home affairs spokesman for the main opposition Conservative party David Davis called for a review into the situation, while his Liberal Democrat counterpart Nick Clegg said that the government should be getting more control order suspects into court.

“As we have always made clear, the danger of control orders is that they short-circuit due process and keep suspects in a state of limbo,” Clegg said.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil liberties campaign group Liberty, said the two escapes confirmed that control orders were ”unsafe and fundamentally unfair”. “If someone is truly a dangerous terror suspect, why would you leave them at large?

“On the other hand, it is completely cruel and unfair to label someone a terrorist and to subject them to a range of punishments for years on end without ever charging them or putting them on trial,” she said.
Does this mean you'll allow expeditious trials and have these thugs locked up?
Control orders were introduced last year to replace emergency laws brought in after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States which allowed the government to lock up foreign nationals suspected of involvement in international terrorism without charge or trial. When Britain’s upper parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords, ruled those measures illegal, the government brought in control orders.

Human rights legislation prevented the men from being deported because they faced being sent to countries where they could be tortured or treated badly.
No such sympathy for the bombing victims as far as we can tell ...
In June, a senior judge quashed control orders made against six men, saying they were incompatible with article five of the European Convention on Human Rights, but the government has appealed this ruling.
Posted by: Steve White 2006-10-18
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=168977