UK legislators blast govt over terrorism curbs

London, Mar 4: A British parliamentary committee accused the government today of breaking European human rights law with its curbs on terrorism suspects and urged it to do more to prosecute suspects instead.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair rushed ''control orders'' through parliament in 2005 after courts threw out emergency post-Sept. 11 powers to jail foreign suspects indefinitely.

The orders gave authorities the power to impose a variety of restrictions on terrorism suspects ranging from surrendering their passports or restricting movement to electronic tagging.

A judge last year threw out control orders that confined six terrorism suspects to their houses for 18 hours a day, saying they broke the European Convention on Human Rights by depriving the men of liberty without trial. Three other terrorism suspects under control orders have absconded.

The British parliament is debating whether to renew for another year the government's authority to impose the control orders. The lower house of parliament has given its assent while the upper House of Lords debates the issue on Monday.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights, made up of legislators from both houses of parliament, voiced concern that the government was asking parliament to renew a power it said was ''being routinely exercised in breach of the right to liberty'' enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

PHONE TAPS

Parliament was being asked to be complicit in a de facto exemption from the European Convention, without an opportunity to debate whether this was justified, it said in a report.

''We also draw to parliament's attention our serious concerns about the vigour with which the government is pursuing prosecution as its preferred counter-terrorism measure and what we now consider to be the urgency of the need to bring forward measures to facilitate prosecution,'' it said.

Britain has been on high alert since four Britons killed 52 people on London's transport system in July 2005 in Western Europe's first Islamist suicide bombings.

The government has sought to justify control orders by saying they could be used in cases where authorities have collected evidence using techniques such as phone taps that are not admissible in British courts.

The committee said the government could do much more to overcome the main obstacles to criminal prosecution, for example by allowing the use of wiretap evidence in court.

Civil rights group Liberty said control orders made Britons less safe and less free.

The Home Office (interior ministry) defended their use.

''We have always maintained that control orders are not our preferred option for dealing with suspected terrorists and even then we had to fight hard in parliament against strong opposition to achieve it,'' a Home Office spokesman said.

''That said, in the absence of an alternative, control orders remain an essential tool for our law enforcement agencies where it's not possible to prosecute individuals for terrorism-related activity and, in the case of foreign nationals, where they can't be removed from the UK.''

REUTERS

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