One league table Britain doesn’t want to lead
Following our last Liberty post, the Government has finally put forward proposals to up the number of days any one of us can be held for detention without charge to a splendid 42. Civil rights group Liberty asked Provokateur to help them campaign on this important issue.
Yup, it’s true. If Government proposals to increase the number of days you can be help without charge to 42 then that would make us world leaders on the How Long Can You Be Held With Being Charged league table. Naysayers criticise Britain for failing to make its mark in the world, but this is one league table we certainly lead the way in.
This ad is one of a series we have produced for Liberty and is running in today’s Guardian. Nice, simple and to the point. By focusing on the remarkable excess of the Government’s proposals, and the extent to which we dwarf any other country, we hope to get people thinking about the issue in a new way.
-
42 days for those suspected of terrorism may very well be too high but I would recommend 100 at least for Soccer fans…
See what I mean..?
-
Please do the world a favor by warning them that you can be held for a whole two presidential terms in the US. We USians need the truth to get out. And give a nice middle finger up to those future chasers. Bunch of trigger-fingered-knee-jerking-hysterical-ADHD-paranoids they are.
-
whine whine whine… so typically lib.. my goodness, how about concentrating all that whining and bitching about protecting US and not the terrorists? Oh.. that’s cause Al Gore was not pres in 2001.. if he had been, the Dem’s could have won everything and been the war party. Shame. Let’s see how Barak Hussein Obabama does.
-
Couple that with being the country in the world with by far the most cctv cameras per person, and it all starts to look pretty grim. What’s even worse is I find myself agreeing with David Davies of the tory party.
-
Thought-provoking and interesting. A very effective political ad.
-
This will be the end of democracy… they will start to work against their own law and that will be the downside of it all…
-
Although I entirely agree with your propositions and values, your site would better serve the intelligent community if you included some kind of citation links regarding your page about habeas corpus at “http://www.provokateur.com/news/index.php/2007/12/10/57/”.
-
The government’s a bunch of criminals.
-
So you guys still doin that tower of London thing, huh?
-
hmmm. You can be held for two days without charge in the USA you say?
You never heard of Guantanamo Bay?My main issue with the UK situation is that terrorism is actually at it’s lowest level for many years. If the reason for lengthening detention is to keep the public safe, then why was nothing like this done during the very real threat the UK faced from the IRA in the 1970’s and 80’s? It would appear that there are ulterior motives at work within the British government.We must all stand against these proposals and be watchful. If we are not cautious and if we do nothing we could watch successive governments slowly melt our freedoms away, until the point where we are truly kept like cattle, or tagged and put to work for the corporate giants like slaves.
-
Your graph looks good but is sadly inaccurate. In France, a detaining magistrate can hold a suspect up to four years without charge, and only last week a terror suspect was released in spain after 130 days of captivity. All the new law does is make a realistic hold-without-charge date, so the government can act against terrorists legally, as opposed to what the Conservative government did with the IRA- suspend the habeas corpus and intern people without charge for years outside, acting outside the law.
-
Hmmm… Wasn’t England the birthplace of habeas corpus too? Shame, really. But as a Yank, I can’t point fingers, what with Gitmo and rendition and all that.
-
Once again the US is getting closer to a dictatorship. Instead of redefining our laws maybe we should reconsider foreign policy. America’s form of Democracy creates Terrorism. God bless our arms dealers, god bless our oil firms, god bless the sweatshops we run, god bless American. God Bless America!
-
Has anyone ever heard of prisoner of war camps? They are these places where enemy troops are held until the war is over so they won’t kill any more of our people. It happened a lot in this thing called World War II (that is a “2″ in Roman numerals). Guantanamo Bay is a prisoner of war camp, for terrorists who refuse to obey the Geneva Convention for the rules of war. They don’t play by the rules and so they are not subject to the laws governing the treatment of citizens of a nation. Then the American Supreme Court comes along and says, “Oh, the poor littler fellers. Better give them attorneys and special treatment,unlike any other enemy in the history of the world.” I say, fine. Let the Supreme Court enforce it, then. Liberals are the first to cry out when murderers are punished, and the last ones to actually fight for the rights of the victims. And they just lost the right to take away everyone else’s firearms, too.
-
You’ve got USA there as 2 days, maybe true constitutionally, but in reality its several years of torture in Guantanamo Bay. Stop being such a bandwagon-jumping, self-styled protector of liberty and realise that these apparent infringements on our human rights are there to help and protect the overwhelming majority who aren’t rapists, murderers or terrorists.
-
Brian,
Thanks for pointing out that it is 2 in Roman Numerals. You must have just learned that seeing you had to point that out to the rest of us. Congrats on passing 2nd Grade. (That is Second written out)
-
Good job Joe Pike, ignoring all of the valid points he made and picking on the one piece of his post that you can.
You, sir, are a champion debater… don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Joe is right, though. Gitmo is POWs. The folks that are there were fighting against the rules of the Geneva Convention. Like every other nation on earth (until now) they are held until the war is over.
-
Erm, Brian is right.
-
Actually Brian is wrong. The US specifically changed the definition of those held in Guantanamo from ‘prisoners of war’ to ‘enemy combatants’. Small difference in wording but huge difference in implications. Prisoners of war is a Geneva convention term that US does not follow. Enemy combatants can be legally water bordered of whatever else the American Government requires to extract information.
Ref: http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=5312
-
Sadly this is just a sign of the way the UK is going, it is steadly powering its way to be a nation with no national freedoms. If something isnt done soon then in 10 years time it will be worse than Germany during Nazi times.
-
That’s stupid. London, which has a population of, let’s say eight million people, would have maybe five working terrorists, tops. That’s 0.00000625% of the population.
Let’s assume that 10,000 people will leave an unattended bag in a place of public transportation every year (this is an overestimate). 0.125% of the population will have left an unattended bag, and (assuming that terrorists will make an attack every year) of that 0.125%, 0.05% of those people will be making a genuine bomb threat. That means that imprisoning people without probable cause is about 99.95% inaccurate.
It costs money to hold someone prisoner for 42 days. I don’t live in England, but I’m going to assume that feeding prisoners comes out of the government’s pocket. Let’s assume that each meal amounts to a cost of 5 pounds. That’s fifteen pounds for one day of food, or 630 pounds for the full 42 days. If they imprison 10,000 people a year and exact this law, that will amount to 6,300,000 pounds, for food alone. If we include clothing, building upkeep, phone calls, and other amenities, the price would be much, much higher.
Of course, after someone has been in prison for 42 days, they’ll most likely be fired since they have been absent from work for over a month. These ten thousand people will be unemployed, which means they won’t be paying taxes, which means less revenue for England. It’s a lost-lose situation- you don’t catch terrorists, and you make less money.
-
I am curious, what does torture mean? Because if we are referring to pantyhose being put over someones head and pictures being taken, as torture, I’m a little shocked. What about our troops, who if captured are most likely going to lose their heads, literally. As a country we are beginning to pity the terrorist, who most likely has killed our own people, because there is a picture of him with women’s underwear on his head. Oh the barbarism!! For shame! We need to wake up, we are at war, whether we like it or not. We will never win, or simply be done, if our own people are more concerned about an embarrassing photo than our own soldiers being subjected to real torture. I love my country, but the people that live hear are really starting to make me a little nauseous.
