Preserving civil liberties

[D-Notice]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1526312,00.html

MPs will also need to be vigilant in monitoring yet another anti-terrorist bill already promised for this session. To his credit, Charles Clarke... openly conceded last week that the government's ID card bill would not have prevented the bombings. At least this should make it more difficult for the government to apply more pressure on MPs to support the unnecessary and divisive bill. But Mr. Clarke will seek tomorrow, at an emergency meeting of the EU justice and interior ministers that he will chair, much wider retention of telecoms traffic data. Liberal Democrats rightly questioned why, when terrorists would be able to use pay-as-you-go phones or internet cafes to escape detection, European states were being required to maintain logs of all citizens' calls, text messages, emails and websites. Even Franco Frattini, the EU's commissioner for justice and security, called for a much shorter period (six months to a year) than the five years that Mr Clarke is reported to favour.

MPs must remember draconian procedures introduced to control terrorists can end up applying to non-terrorists. Look no further than last week's disgraceful ruling by the law lords. They upheld the right to withhold from potential parolees evidence denying their release - a procedure introduced to apply to terrorists, now applied more widely. It denies ordinary criminals the right to challenge their imprisonment.

The case is Roberts v Parole Board or a http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldjudgmt/jd050707/robert.pdf">pdf version

I guess the Belmrash ruling from last Xmas was a one-off :-(

[bennywhale]

1. The power for a politician to put people under house arrest, acceptance

of torture evidence in court, increased access to citizen's data etc etc. The democracy we are defending is literally crumbling.

I think this softly does approach by Clark is just until the dust settles so he can't be accused of exploiting it. Bush seemed to do the same in US directly after 9/11 but within weeks was destroying liberties. I think ID cards will be aggressively pushed through and i also think Blair will use one of his favourite toys the parliament act to impose more draconion powers on us over the coming months.

I think those of us who care about liberty should ber prepared for a fight.

[D-Notice]

2. It's already been reported

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_objectid=15681436%26method=full%26siteid=94762%26headline=no%2dre%2dthink%2don%2did%2dcards%2d-name_page.html

Despite the growing opposition to ID cards, Mr Blair appeared to threaten the use of the Parliament Act - the device used by the House of Commons in a last resort to force legislation through the Lords.

During PM's Question Time, he said peers should bow to the will of the elected Government when considering the bill later this year because ID cards had been included in Labour's manifesto.

Mr Blair told MPs: "We fought an election on it and we are democratically elected."

[D-Notice]

3. Sorry!

got the PDF address wrong!

It's actually located here