Curiously, in its zeal, the government had overlooked its own legislation which already provides sweeping powers to deal with genuine national emergencies on that scale. The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 was explicitly designed to deal with terrorist threats, amongst other national emergencies. It allows the government to extend pre-charge detention beyond the twenty-eight-day limit by additional, and renewable, thirty-day periods. The extensions are subject to judicial review and parliamentary approval. If the government really needs this power, it must publicly state that there exists an emergency which makes it necessary to use it. If there existed a plot to blow fifty planes out of the sky – the hypothetical scenario posed by the government – there could be little doubt that there would exist a genuine emergency. It would also be both impossible and irresponsible to try to conceal the real situation for more than a few days. In practice, any public statement on the emergency would not need to be made in the immediate midst of a crisis. The government would just be required to make its statement before the expiry of the existing twenty-eight-day pre-charge detention limit. So, even on this hypothetical scenario, there was no need to extend the current twenty-eight-day limit – a reserve power was already in place, subject to robust safeguards.
Even human rights groups like Liberty and barristers, including David Pannick QC, confirmed that such broad emergency powers could be used, removing any conceivable justification for a further extension of the twenty-eight-day limit, even under the worst nightmare scenarios conjured up by ministers. However, the government rejected this analysis on two grounds. It suggested that there were technical difficulties in using the 2004 Act in this way. It also claimed that declaring an emergency would create panic. It is difficult to take either argument seriously. If there are technical difficulties in applying the 2004 Act, they could presumably be addressed through a minor legislative amendment providing the clarity required. Equally, the British public are not known for their disposition to panic, whether during the Blitz of 1940, the campaign of IRA violence, the London bombings in July 2005, in the aftermath of the terrorist plot at Heathrow in August 2006 or during the attacks in Glasgow and London in 2007. On the contrary, British public reaction has been consistently characterized by composure and resolve. Furthermore, the government itself has hardly been shy about publicly briefing blood-curdling assessments of the terrorist threat. MI5 now regularly briefs on the thousands of terror suspects operating in the UK and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner referred to the future terrorist threat as the coming ‘epidemic’. The government’s refusal to consider its existing powers under the 2004 Act, and insistence on draconian new powers, demonstrates its preference for placing Britain under a permanent undeclared state of emergency – rather than a temporary and transparent one, if and when the strict necessity should arise.
Finally, faced with mounting opposition in 2008, the Home Secretary based her proposals for a forty-two-day maximum limit on what she referred to as a ‘precautionary principle’. The precautionary principle is derived from environmental law, which presents a rather different set of challenges to counter-terrorism. There has been no explanation of why this environmental principle is relevant or what it might mean in the context of terrorism. It appears little more than a thin veneer to allow the government to keep returning to Parliament for additional police powers on the basis of an unspecified threat that may or may not materialize at some indeterminate point in the future.
While there is not a shred of hard evidence to support the case for extending detention without charge beyond twenty-eight days, the government has encouraged a common, but wholly misleading, assumption that extending pre-charge detention would help deal with the classic ‘ticking bomb’ scenario – that we need longer than twenty-eight days to hold terrorist masterminds or suicide bombers who might otherwise abscond to launch a terrorist attack. In fact, experience suggests the opposite. The key players in a terrorist plot are, in practice, the least likely to be held for the maximum period of detention without charge, because they are the suspects that tend to be questioned and investigated first. During Operation Overt, all the alleged ringleaders were arrested and charged within twenty-one days. It was only those either subsequently released (without further suspicion) or charged with lesser offences that were held for twenty-eight days.
This case illustrates an emerging trend: it is precisely those most likely to be innocent or least involved in a terrorist conspiracy who are most likely to be held for the longest period of detention. Far from being necessary to deal with imminent threats to public safety or terrorist masterminds, extensions of pre-charge detention are generally used to follow up secondary leads and suspects. Each extension of the maximum period of detention risks exacerbating this trend – delaying the point at which the police need either to charge or release those on the fringe of their investigation. It is often said that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, but the reality of police investigations suggests that those with nothing to hide may be most at risk from extensions of pre-charge detention.
If an innocent person is detained for weeks or months, the consequences can be personally disastrous, even if he is eventually released. The case of Lotfi Raissi demonstrates the devastating impact that prolonged detention without charge can have on a wholly innocent individual. Raissi was an Algerian-born pilot living in London. He was arrested in Britain after 9/11, because he had attended the same flying school as the bombers. US authorities accused him of having taught the 9/11 bombers to fly the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers in New York. The FBI quickly realized that this was unlikely to be true. However, the British police held Raissi in pre-charge detention awaiting extradition to the US on the flimsiest basis. He was not held on suspicion of terrorism offences but on trivial grounds, including that he had lied on his pilot’s licence by failing to reveal previous knee surgery – an allegation that was subsequently proved false as well.
It appears that the US authorities were still interested in questioning Raissi, but no longer thought it likely that he was involved in 9/11. The Court of Appeal in Britain later criticized both the US and UK authorities for deploying this ‘device’ to keep Raissi in detention without charge for over four months. The court went on to criticize the British police and the Crown Prosecution Service for ‘serious defaults’ in allowing this abuse of process. The court exonerated Raissi of all allegations, delivering a judgment that paved the way for him to seek compensation. The case shows how, in the wake of a terrorist attack, the police can come under considerable pressure to bend the law at the expense of a suspect who may prove to be entirely innocent.
In this instance an innocent man’s life was left in ruins. Raissi was twice stabbed by prisoners during his period of detention, because of allegations that he had links to the 9/11 terrorists. He suffered two nervous breakdowns under the strain and did not sleep properly for seven years. He lost his job and found himself blacklisted from finding a new one. He became entirely dependent on his family, although in the wake of his arrest both his wife and his brother’s wife also lost their jobs.
If extending pre-charge detention would undermine a fundamental freedom, with severe consequences for the innocent that are imprisoned – as half of all those held for twenty-eight days have been – there is an increasing number of warnings that, far from making us safer, an extension to forty-two days may actually jeopardize our security. In addition to criticisms by human rights lawyers and NGOs, a growing chorus of security experts have publicly declared their opposition to forty-two days – on the basis that it is either irrelevant as a security measure or actually risks making the terrorist threat worse.
While the government has consistently cited evidence from MI5 on the growing numbers involved in terrorism to bolster its case for forty-two days, it is striking that the current and previous two heads of MI5 have either criticized or refused to back an extension beyond twenty-eight days. In an interview in July 2007, the former head of MI5, Stella Rimington, made clear her opposition to an extension: ‘It behoves us all to question when governments want to bring in increasingly draconian measures.’
This was followed by further, more recent, criticism from her successor at MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, who declared she could not support the extension to forty-two days ‘on a practical