UK Can Now Hold People Without Charge For 42 Days

the_leander writes "Prime Minister Gordon Brown has narrowly won a House of Commons vote on extending the maximum time police can hold terror suspects to 42 days. There is talk of compensation packages available for the falsely accused. The chances of you getting that money however are slim to none, lets not forget, this is the same country that charges prisoners who have been falsely accused for bed and boarding costs."

The Question

Is that 42 in base 13?

Re:The Question

Nobody makes jokes in base 13...

Jumping the gun a bit....

....as the Bill in question has only been passed by the House of Commons. It's got to go before the House of Lords yet. Many commentators think it is not going to do too well there.

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

....as the Bill in question has only been passed by the House of Commons. It's got to go before the House of Lords yet. Many commentators think it is not going to do too well there.

However there are still 315 people who really should be held for 28 days without charge. Are there enough truely patriotic police to do this though.

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

It's got to go before the House of Lords yet

Ah yes, our fine tradition of having decisions by the people we elect overturned by a bunch of unelected lords.

Nope, nothing wrong with our system at all.

Those unelected lords are there precisely to stop bad (but popular) laws from being passed.

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

I prefer to think of it as our fine tradition of having legislation sanity checked by a bunch of people who aren't primarily motivated by re-election and "making their place in history".

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

You cite three persons all a product of the 20th Century - the House of Lords has been a part of British Parliament since 1295. It seems to have done us well in the past 713 years....

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

Um.. the House of Lords have their powers severily curtailed by the Parliament Act and for the most part the Lords is only able to delay legislation. It a part of the UK's unwritten constitution.

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

Except it's not unwritten. All of what's considered part of UK constitutional law is written in the form of acts, treaties and to a very limited extent precedent.

(IANAL, but I'm married to one, and one of the first things they drill into UK law students when dealing with constitutional law is that they better not ever write on an exam that it's unwritten).

It's a long, long time

The Lords are only allowed to send Bills back to the Commons twice. They have no power other than to force debate and thought. It's not part of the "unwritten constitution", it's the Parliament Acts of 1911(Liberal) and 1949(Labour). The British constitution is mostly written, it's just written all over the place.

I would ask the grandparent how much he would like to be imprisoned for a month and ten days, only to be dumped back on the streets having no idea of why, no legal right to be told why and a scant chance of limited compensation. Can you imagine the effect on your family, your job, your reputation? This allows the state to destroy individuals with only limited checks and balances.

There isn't a day now where I don't thank god for the House of Lords injecting, unbelievably, some sanity into Parliament.

At least...

At least the English know not to do something like Guantanamo Bay. They tried that 220 years ago, and created Australia.

Re:At least...

No fair - the ones sent to Australia were already charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced; and at least they were still in the Commonwealth & subject to British/colonial law & legal process.

Only barbarians would ship their alleged criminals to some overseas outpost then claim they had no recourse to the laws of the country...

Re:At least...

So you're saying that in 200 years, the descendants of the Guantanamo Bay inmates are going to thrash the Americans at all their sports?

As opposed to the US ...

... where it's currently 6+ years and counting.

Oh wait, I forgot - they're not being held by the police, and they're not actually in America. My bad.

Jose Padilla?

Wasn't Jose Padilla held without charges for a number of years in South Carolina?

Great...

We don't need terrorists anymore, we are doing their job for them. Thanks Gordon.

Hmmm....

As mentioned above, the bill has to make it through the house of lords yet, and since the Lords are usually the "conscience" of the legal process in the UK (weird, but true), it's highly unlikely to make it.

And, of course, 42 days in police custody, still with all human-rights privileges and in a standard jail subject to standard civilian law is a significantly better deal than several years in a foreign military jail, with questionable legal status, and subject to military law and "process". I very very much doubt these suspects, held for 42 days maximum, will be tortured and humiliated, either.

In other words, glass-house-dwellers, throw no stones...

Simon.

Re:Hmmm....

The tragic thing about all this, is that it won't get through the upper chamber and Gordon Brown knows this. His problem was that losing the vote would show him up as a weak leader, and not in control of his own party. This way he'll get to blame the unelected House of Lords (many of whom he and Tony appointed under their People's Peers programme) for the legislation not being passed. [guardian.co.uk]

Ironically, we may end up with all the negative effects from such legislation without any of the (supposed) benefits - i.e. actually being able to lock people up. World + dog outside the UK will believe that it's been passed, removing us even further from what little moral high ground we've got left to stand on and eroding UK citizens' perceptions of their own liberty. This is perhaps the first time I've ever said this, but thank god for the unelected, undemocratic House of Lords. Without them, this would already be law.

Am I simplifying this? Probably, yes. It just seems that regardless of the merits or otherwise of this legislation (and no Slashdot, I'm not arguing in favour of it), getting the vote through the House of Commons was more about saving Brown's arse than actually achieving anything.

Slashdot, as usual, can't wait to bash Britain.

To hell with facts, let's just post grossly misrepresented stories. The police *can't* hold terror suspects for 42 days, until this is passed by the House of Lords, which is unlikely to happen.

I could understand it if /. got similar stories in the US so utterly wrong, for example if some congressman from Bumfuck, Iowa proposed the death penalty for people caught with more than 1g of cannabis, and /. reported it as a huge roundup and mass execution of dope smokers.

Of course, it's posted by samzenpus, who seems to have a particular dislike of the UK.

Billing the prisoners

Did they pass the bill for charging prisoners for their Information Retrieval Procedures yet? Is that next week?

42 days

Looks like the Brits finally have acknowledged that 42 is the answer to everything.

With two words, I destroy your argument

"Guantanamo bay"

or how about: "Abu Ghraib"

The US certainly has no moral high ground. They rape, torture, and sexually humiliate *suspected* terrorists, in a foreign land, out of sight of the people because they're so ashamed of what they do in the people's name.

If (I'm not, but *if*) I was a suspected terrorist, I'd take 42 days maximum in a standard UK jail, held under standard UK law by standard UK law-enforcement over indefinite detainment in a foreign military prison, with no legal status, and denied the right of habeus corpus. I'd prefer to be jailed in the UK rather than tortured and sexually abused by the US military.

Just saying. I continue to hope that the American people abhor and remove this stain on their countries honour, but it seems to be getting worse, not better.

Simon.

Re:With two words, I destroy your argument

Well, no, obviously it is *not* the policy of the UK that they can be held for 42 days. It's passed one house, barely. The house entrusted with the duty of rejecting popular but bad laws has yet to rule on it. It's *entirely* within the remit of the house of Lords to reject this out of hand, and it's one of the checks-and-balances that the second house is there to provide...

Abu Ghraib may have been an isolated "incident" (though an awful lot of people would have needed to conveniently ignore what happened there...), but Guantanamo Bay is precisely current US policy.

If you are a citizen in the US, they'll simply fabricate evidence and send you to be tortured [nytimes.com] in one of the less squeamish regimes that the US has links with (eg: Syria)...

Given the amount of illegal wiretapping, the removal of habeus corpus for non-citizens, the policy of torturing suspected terrorists coupled with the ability of the president to arbitrarily designate someone a terrorist, (I could go on and on...), I find the implications disturbing in the extreme.

I don't agree with the 42 days thing, but I think the glass-houses line really does apply here...

Simon.

Re:Tories vs Labor

The Tories opposed it because they need contentious issues to argue over, not because they wouldn't do it themselves.

Note that they also argue against the governments attempts to have private health bosses take over failing hospitals, even though it was the Tories who started the privatisation of publicly owned services in the first place.

Personally I don't think there's much difference between the Labour Party and the Conservatives any more. That's no big deal, in spite of what whichever one isn't in power says about the others failings, they end up doing almost exactly the same things.

it's without CHARGE, not without trial

The bill defines how long you can hold someone without charging him with a crime. That's got nothing to do with how long, after he has been charged, it can take before he is tried.

As I understand it, the current limit is 28 days, so they're just tacking on an extra two weeks, and according to the BBC, they want the right on a "contingency basis" when the crime in question is particularly complicated and time-consuming to unravel, so they can figure out who's who and know whom to charge and whom to let go. An example they give is when there are international complications, e.g. the police need to get info from another country's police, immigration, or security services, which, of course, can take an annoyingly long time, since you have to rely on purely voluntary cooperation (no English judge can compel a French police caption, or a Saudi immigration agency, or the FBI).

In other words, as a general rule, the 28-day limit stays in effect, but in certain unusual circumstances -- e.g. something like the London bombing, evidence that some major operation has taken place, or is about to take place -- then the government can raise the 28-day limit to 42 days temporarily. Even if the limit is raised, a judge needs to sign off on applying it to any particular individual. Parlaiment can step in at any time after the limit is raised and reverse it. And, in any event, the raising expires after 60 days.

I dunno, when you look at the bill in detail, it seems rather, well, moderate. Not quite like the massive Armageddon / burning pile of civil liberties / return of the Gestapo, Inquisition, and the rack that lots of Chicken Littles seem to think it is. *shrug*