Control Orders were enacted into British law by Parliament in 2005. Now they are doubt after the Law Lords ruled that they breeched human rights leglisation and fundamental legal rights.
Alan Travis in The Guardian reports:
In a unanimous decision, a panel of nine law lords found in favour of three Libyan men, who argued that the Government’s refusal to give any details of the evidence against them made a fair hearing impossible. The men have not been named for legal reasons.
While the control orders against the men have not been quashed, their cases will have to be heard again. But the Government now faces having to lift orders granted using secret evidence. Suspects can be banned from meeting certain people, stopped from using mobile phones or computers, or even forced to adhere to a strict 16-hour home curfew under the orders.
They were introduced in 2005 after the law lords ruled that the previous practice of locking up foreign terrorist suspects who had not been charged with an offence breached their human rights. There are 17 terrorist suspects who are currently subjected to control orders, six of whom are British citizens.
Lord Philips of Worth Matravers, the senior law lord, said: “A trial procedure can never be considered fair if a party to it is kept in ignorance of the case against him.” Alan Johnson, the newly installed Home Secretary, called the ruling “extremely disappointing”, adding that it would make it more difficult to protect the public from terrorism.
“All control orders will remain in force for the time being and we will continue to seek to uphold them in the courts. In the meantime, we will consider this judgment and our options carefully,” he said.
The security services claim that to reveal their secret sources and intercepts who compromise their sources. This consideration is more important than the rule of law. It seems now that control orders will simply wither away.
The crucial difference between Australia and Britain is that they have enforceable human rights legislation, and other than the limited constitutional guarantees including: the right to vote, the right to trial for some offenses, limited protection of religious freedom and implied rights of political communication.
To quote Get UP:
Australia is the only democratic country without formal human rights protections and has few human rights protections.
Furthermore, constitutional change is difficult, and any law enacted by Parliament to protect human rights could be rescinded or overridden. There are human rights and we ordinarily take them for granted but they are not legally entrenched rights.