Control Orders under fire AGAIN - when will they scrap them?

The UK’s Home Affairs Select Committee, made up of MPs, are the latest to put the boot into the UK government’s Control Orders regime.

I could hardly have put it better myself:

“The legality of the control order regime is in serious doubt. It is our view that it is fundamentally wrong to deprive individuals of their liberty without revealing why. The security services should take recent court rulings as an opportunity to rely on other forms of monitoring and surveillance.”

These ‘court rulings’ are those of the Law Lords, the highest court in the land (now rebranded as the Supreme Court) who stated that a trial in which the accused can’t see or properly challenge the evidence against him, isn’t a fair trial.

It stands to reason really, and it’s an argument that Amnesty has stuck by ever since Control Orders were first introduced. Yet the government has stubbornly defended Control Orders, racking up £8 million in legal fees on these cases alone last year, as reported in today’s Independent.

With Control Orders under attack from all sides – courts, MPs and human rights organisations  – surely it’s time that the government admitted that they’re fundamentally flawed. As the Committee’s report noted today, more use needs to be made of the courts: if people are suspected of involvement in terrorism, they should be charged and given a fair trial – not subjected to some shadowy form of ‘justice’ like Control Orders.