Government is exploiting fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties - says former head of MI5 (Wantage and Didcot Liberal Democrats)

Wantage and Didcot Liberal Democrats <info@wantagelibdems.org.uk>

Government is exploiting fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties - says former head of MI5

February 21, 2009 10:50 AM

The Liberal Democrats' Flying Bird of Liberty

Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, has accused the government of exploiting fear of terrorism to bring in laws that restrict civil liberties. In an interview in a Spanish newspaper, published in the Daily Telegraph, Dame Stella also accuses the US of "tortures". The Home Office said it was vital to strike a right balance between privacy, protection and sharing personal data. It said any policies which impact on privacy must be "proportionate".

Dame Stella has previously been critical of the government's attempts to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42 days and the plan to introduce ID cards. "It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state," she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

Dame Stella said the British security services were "no angels," but they did not kill people. "The US has gone too far with Guantánamo and the tortures," she said. "MI5 does not do that. Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect - there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification."

Dame Stella's comments come as a study is published by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) that accuses the US and the UK of undermining the framework of international law. Former Irish president Mary Robinson, the president of the ICJ said: "Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and to repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years. Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats."

The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner said the ICJ report would probably have more of an impact than Dame Stella's remarks because it was a wide-ranging, three-year study carried out by an eminent group of practising legal experts. Dame Stella appeared to be more restrained in her comments than the ICJ, he added. She was keen to stress the risk of civil liberties being curtailed, while the jurists insisted that international law had already been "actively undermined".

Human rights campaign group Liberty pointed to a number of other recent developments it said represented "a creeping encroachment on our fundamental rights":

Government plans for a giant database to record the times, dates and recipients of all emails and text messages sent and phone calls made in the UK
The growth of Britain's DNA database - it is now the world's largest, per head of population, with samples from some 4 million people
The use by local councils of laws designed to track criminals and terrorists to spy on ordinary citizens. In one case a family was watched to see if they were really living in a school catchment area
The spread of CCTV cameras. Britain now reportedly has some 4m, the highest density in western Europe
Proposals for "secret inquests," excluding relatives, juries and the media, which the government says would prevent intelligence details leaking out

Wantage and Didcot spokesman Alan Armitage, a lifelong member of Liberty, said: "This is damning testament to just how much liberty has been wantonly sacrificed in the 'war on terror'."