Jihadi Du Jour: Anti-terror laws under fire after two terrorists escape

Why house arrests for terror suspects may not be such a good idea.

LONDON • Britain’s anti-terrorism legislation came under renewed fire yesterday as a row over two international terrorist suspects who have gone on the run intensified.

Opposition parties and pressure groups said that the escape of the pair, reportedly a Briton of Pakistani descent and an Iraqi, highlighted that the control orders to which they were subject were dangerous and unfair.

Control orders are a loose kind of house arrest which usually compel suspects to report regularly to police and place them under a curfew, although critics say suspects should instead be charged and face a trial. But Home Office minister Tony McNulty hinted on Monday that the government may go in a different direction and diverge from the European Convention on Human Rights to tighten up the regime using existing legislation.

“We’ve got scope... to look at derogating orders that actually step away from the European Convention on Human Rights. That remains an option and we keep these things under review,” he told BBC television.

The Home Office has not made public any details of the escapes, but the BBC reported on its website that one of the fugitives was a British man of Pakistani descent suspected of wanting to go to Iraq and fight against the United States and British-led coalition there.

He is 25 and escaped from the mental health unit of a hospital in south-west London in the last few weeks, Britain’s Press Association (PA) reported. The other man is Iraqi and is thought to have been missing for some months, the BBC online said.

Did he say they may diverge from the European Convention on Human Rights to tighten things up? Go Britain! Someone needs to shows these terrorists some gonads. Trust me if the Democrats win a majority in the US election in November, we will not have any gonads to show.

Meanwhile some civil liberties gobbledegook-

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil liberties campaign group Liberty, said the two escapes confirmed that control orders were “unsafe and fundamentally unfair”.

“If someone is truly a dangerous terror suspect, why would you leave them at large?

“On the other hand, it is completely cruel and unfair to label someone a terrorist and to subject them to a range of punishments for years on end without ever charging them or putting them on trial,” she said.

Well make up my mind, will ya? Are they dangerous enough to detain or not?