Prosecuting terrorism: the Old Bailey versus Belmarsh (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, 2023
Terrorism presents one the biggest criminal justice postmodern challenges worldwide. The way criminal justice systems proact and react to mitigate and prevent such criminality raises a plethora of legal, socio-political, and strategic hurdles relating to how terror crime is defined, the human rights of the accused, protecting due process when using secret courts, the use of special advocates, the use of national security courts, civil rights i.e., freedom of association, cross-jurisdictional information sharing, and the requirement or right to prosecute etc. In this article, which is influenced by criminological theory, the definition of terror crime in the United Kingdom and at an International level is examined to ascertain whether common definitional elements exist, and the complex and competing local and International interests that are being balanced in preventing and/or prosecuting such crime.
Mohamed Albeshr, 2022
The proposed study will review the contribution of local and regional laws in combating terrorism in the United Kingdom. Terrorism refers to criminal actions perpetrated by people to destabilize peace or meet their interests against the will of many . Most of the activities associated with terrorism have a real and direct impact on human rights . There are devastating consequences for enjoyment on rights to liberty, life, and physical integrity for those affected . The study will assess the history showing Britain's response to the increase of terrorism incidents since the 1880s .
Parliamentary Review of Terrorism Measures
Modern Law Review, 2005
Governor of Durham Prison, ex parte Hardial Singh [1984] 1WLR 704., 4 On which see Chahal v. United Kingdom (1996) 23 EHRR 413 at [80], [86], [107]. 5 ATCSA, s. 30 provided that challenges to derogation or designation had to be heard by SIAC. 6 [2004] QB 335 (C.A.). 7 The House of Lords previously had held that deportation on national security grounds does not require any direct threat to the UK and can be for foreign policy reasons where the threat is indirect: Secretary of State for the Home Department v. Rehman [2003] 1 AC 153. 8 At [33].
Terrorist Precursor Offences: Evaluating the Law in Practice
Criminal Law Review, 2020
The Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006 created a suite of new precursor offences related to terrorism. This article critically evaluates these provisions in light of how they have been interpreted and applied in practice. It focuses on three especially important offences: preparing acts of terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, and collecting information of a kind likely to be useful to a terrorist. All three offences, it is concluded, have proved to be problematically broad in their scope, and to some extent avoidably so. Notable problems include the offences' extension to conduct that carries little to no real risk of contributing to future terrorist attacks, their implications for innocent or even positively valuable conduct, and their likely consequent chilling effects on suspect communities. Suggestions are considered as to how these concerns might be addressed, while still respecting the offences' underlying purpose and arguable principled core.
Laws
Terrorism is a concept that defies a simple and straightforward legal definition. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that there is no Comprehensive Convention on Terrorism with a universally accepted definition of what constitutes “terrorism.” Consequently, States have devised their own definitions of what constitutes terrorism that are typically found in their criminal law. This raises the fundamental question of whether there is a convergence or divergence in jurisprudential trends on what constitutes terrorism among States? Presumably, a convergence in jurisprudential trends is more likely to contribute to combatting the threat of terrorism at the international and national levels. Accordingly, this article comparatively analyzes the definition of terrorism in three common law jurisdictions: the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. It finds that although there are a number of similarities in the definition of terrorism in these three States, they have significantly...
Terrorist Threat Construction and the Transition to Permanent British Counterterrorism Law
After over two decades of renewing temporary counterterrorism laws in Britain from the early 1970s, making such measures permanent with the Terrorism Act 2000 was not necessarily a predictable or predetermined outcome. The Northern Ireland peace process was underway, the Labour party who had voted against temporary counterterrorism laws for over a decade was newly back in power, and historical context pointed to an inconclusiveness around how effective such laws actually were in reducing insecurity. In this article I argue a key element helping explain this transition from temporary to permanent counterterrorism law lies in how particular threat and referent identities were constructed in official British discourse. Drawing on empirical research from a relational-securitization analysis of official British discourses from the late 1960s to the present, this paper argues that processes of identity construction were essential to introducing and justifying the Terrorism Act 2000. The deployment of particular threat and referent labels established in discourse before events such as 9/11 or 7/7, such as “international” terrorism, helped enable the shift in counterterrorism law from temporary emergency response to permanent policy practice.