 | | | | by Bill Durodié |
UK home secretary David Blunkett says he wants to see a debate over introducing new anti-terrorism legislation to make it easier to convict British terror suspects (1).
| No doubt this is an attempt to address the fact that since 9/11 there have been over 500 arrests under British anti-terrorism laws, but only a handful of convictions. Blunkett's proposals include lowering the standard of proof to find guilt, from the current 'beyond reasonable doubt' to one based 'on the balance of probabilities'; he also wants to introduce pre-emptive action to arrest potential suicide bombers.
| Leaving aside the civil rights implications of further augmenting some of the most draconian anti-terrorist legislation in the world - which already allows indefinite arrest for being in possession of information that may prove of use to a terrorist (like a tube map perhaps?) - the logistics of his precautionary approach are laughable.
| That 'prevention is better than cure' (the mantra of the precautionary environmental lobby) is only true if your predictions are entirely accurate. Imagine a profiling system capable of predicting potential terrorists with an accuracy of 99 per cent. Needless to say, such a percentage is nowhere near realisable - but now imagine trying to identify the 19 perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks from among an American population of some 300million. You would end up having to incarcerate three million innocent civilians while a 20 per cent chance would remain that one of the terrorists would slip through your net (2).
| | Still, what else are we to expect from a home secretary who had to withdraw a document predicting gas attacks on the London Underground and who got himself into trouble in autumn 2003 for suggesting that a young Asian arrested in Gloucester was guilty before he had even been charged.
| To coin a phrase, it's not a matter of if Blunkett will blunder again, but when.
| Bill Durodié is director of the International Centre for Security Analysis at King's College London. He is the author of Poisonous Dummies: European Risk Regulation after BSE, European Science and Environment Forum, 1999 (download this book (.pdf 679 KB)). He is also a contributor to Science: Can You Trust the Experts?, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); and Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
Read on:
'Balancing' liberty and security, by David Chandler
spiked-issue: War on terror
(1) See Blunkett plans tougher terror law, 2 February 2004
(2) Example taken from The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age, by Jeffrey Rosen, Random House, 2004. Buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)
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