Personvern, advokater og terror

Gordon Brown har på den ene siden tatt ordet muslim ut av terrorisme, på den annen lagt frem en rekke tiltak mot terror: som å lage et nytt grensepoliti, med elektronisk overvåking av all trafikk inn og ut av Storbritannia.

Brown satser i det hele tatt mye på elektronisk overvåking.

Det er verdt å kaste et sideblikk til Norge, der Datatilsynet truer med å bøtelegge Continental Airlines fordi selskapet forsyner amerikanske myndigheter med altfor mange opplysninger om sine passasjerer fra Norge. EU har etter lange forhandlinger kommet overens med USA om en ny passasjerdata-avtale, som utvider faktalisten og oppbevaringstiden. Norge er ikke forpliktet, men må føre egne forhandlinger med USA. Resultatet vil høyst sannsynlig bli en blåkopi av EU. Datatilsynets trusler mot Continental virker ute av synk med utviklingen på området. Når Datatilsynet kan ha så stort handlingsrom kan det bare være fordi altfor mange toneangivende prioriterer personvern fremfor trygghet.

I både Norge og Storbritannia står et kobbel advokater, forskere og menneskrettstalsmenn klare til å skyte ned forslag om skjerpet kontroll. Det er lov å fremme interesser, men mediene stiller sjelden eller aldri kritiske spørsmål. Historiker Michael Burleigh kommenterer:

Shami Chakrabarti, the barrister whom the BBC assiduously promotes as the voice of a presumed liberal consensus, will widen her Diana-like eyes in outrage, while Amnesty will mutter darkly about internment. Then we’ll hear from Gareth Peirce – the Provos’ and now the jihadis’ lawyer of choice – or her business rival Mudassur Arani, whose website advises Muslims how to deny cooperation with M15. Ms Arani was recently exercised by an attack on Dhiren Barot, the British al-Qaeda terrorist, by a fellow prison inmate. She wants jihadi prisoners all kept together, doubtless so that within ten minutes of such consolidation, she would be whining about a British Guantanamo, from where, say, Clive Stafford Smith, would soon relay lurid terrorist tales of torture to Channel 4 News.

Det pågår nå en debatt over hele Nord-Europa om hvor strenge tiltak som må til. Den tyske innenriksminister Wolfgang Schaüble ønsker et proaktivt politi som hacker seg inn på jihadistenes websider, og driver infiltrasjon. Brown ønsker å utvide varetektsfristen fra 28 til 56 dager, men møter motstand. Amnesty var med en gang ute og mente det minnet om interneringen av IRA.

Burleigh spør hvorfor man ikke ser på praksis i andre europeiske land, hvor reglene til dels er tøffere.

One of the puzzles of our time is why Britain scrupulously adheres to the Human Rights Act, when our allies and partners systematically flout the European Convention on Human Rights. Talk of human rights abuses invariably focuses on the US, with sneering TV documentaries about Guantanamo or CIA “extraordinary rendition”. But on much of the Continent they don’t allow civil liberty lawyers to turn terrorism into a risk-free activity.

When the Socialist Interior Minister of Spain organised a campaign of assassinating Eta terrorists across the border in France during the 1990s, he was following in the footsteps of French governments that had routinely killed FLN and OAS arms traders in the 1960s. Getting Spain’s message, France began deporting Eta suspects to places such as Papua New Guinea, and has since been repatriating radical Islamist clerics. The Germans, likewise, did not hesitate to deport a Turkish imam on grounds of national security, even though he had lived in Germany for 30 years. The former German Interior Minister, Otto Schily, once a lawyer for Baader-Meinhof defendants, cryptically remarked of the jihadis: “Those who love death can have it.”

While we agonise about 28 or 56 days custody, it is not uncommon for terrorist suspects in France to be held in preventive detention for four or five years before their case goes to court. The use of intelligence intercept evidence in courts is being debated here, but the Italian security services have long made transcripts of this material available, so revealing the lying cynicism with which, for example, Milan-based Arab jihadis regard European asylum laws. And then there is the internet, one of the key means of radicalising Muslims. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Interior Minister, wheelchair-bound since a 1990 assassination attempt, has argued recently in favour of hacking into the computers of Islamist radicals. We can’t even manage to shut down jihadi websites or to prohibit subversive organisations, such as Hizb ut-Tahir, from operating on university campuses where the dons think they are dealing with the usual middle-class radicals.