42 is not the answer

Government concessions made to win the vote on 42-day detention will put more pressure on police to charge, endanger lives and threaten the cohesion of communities, terror experts claim.

Ali Naseem Bajwa, terrorism specialist at 25 Bedford Row, says the government’s case for the extension of the current 28-day limit to 42 days was “manifestly not made out” and that concessions offered by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, were “at best ineffectual, at worst misleading, and the result appeared to have more to do with political expediency than anything else”.

In a Commons speech on the day of the vote, Labour MP Diane Abbott said a compensation package offered by the government to suspects held for over 28 days and then subsequently released “will not survive scrutiny by the courts” and that MPs should not vote with the government based “on a shoddy compensation package that will not stand up and will never come into being”.

Bajwa says the proposals to “compensate” terrorism suspects are perhaps the most ill-judged of the concessions on offer.

“No monetary value can be placed on the inevitably terrible consequences of an unwarranted 4-6 weeks of pre-charge detention. An offer of compensation amounts to an admission that there will be a number of innocent persons detained under the proposed powers. In addition, if, as must be likely, no compensation is payable to those who are charged and then subsequently acquitted, there will be added pressure on the police/ CPS to charge innocent persons.”