The Guardian (Manchester, U.K.), January 6, 2008

INTERVIEW: GORDON BROWN ON THE TERROR THREAT TO BRITAIN

[Rachel's introduction: The precautionary principle is increasingly being invoked to curb civil liberties, start pre-emptive wars, torture suspects, and hold people incommunicado in secret prisons for years without formal charges. The purpose of precaution is to protect the things we value and cherish. If you value and cherish war and torture and clandestine prisons then it is logical to invoke precaution to justify them.]

By Nicholas Watt

Why are you pushing so hard with your plans to extend to 42 days the period in which a terror suspect can be held without charge? Many members of your own party, the Lib Dems, the Tories, the DPP, the former attorney general are all expressing doubts if not outright opposition.

A few months ago Liberty published its proposals and said that there were circumstances in which they themselves understood you might have to go beyond 28 days. They proposed using the Civil Contingencies Act to do so. They recognised therefore that there are circumstances in which you may have as a result of the complexity and sophistication to detain people beyond 28 days. Now what I said to that was look, if in principle people right across the political spectrum agree that it's necessary, in certain instances -- unique sometimes perhaps, or special at least and understood to be rare -- then we ought to try and find a way and a consensus for doing that.

And that's why I've been determined to build in what I think are the key elements of something that is acceptable to all sides. And that is if you have someone detained then you have got to have proper judicial oversight. You've got to have continuous accountability. You've got to have parliamentary scrutiny. And I believe that if we could show people that there is proper judicial oversight, in other words nobody stays in prison arbitrarily, and if at the same time there's proper public accountability because an independent reviewer who's an independent figure looks at what has happened to guarantee that, nobody will be detained arbitrarily. What you've then got to do is to satisfy people that all the mechanisms by which civil liberties are [protected] are put in place. Now that's where the debate is at the moment. And I think it's a more rich debate than is simply summed up by a number of days.

Does it frustrate you that you've obviously changed the politics of this issue, by saying it's not about an arbitrary numbers of days, and yet there still seems to be very strong opposition?

I don't think there is as much difference of opinion as the headlines suggest. I've talked at length to Liberty as an organisation. I know that other political parties in the House of Commons are much influenced by what Liberty has said. I've got a great deal of respect for the arguments that have been put forward and I actually think we're not as far away as people have mentioned from reaching an understanding about what the best way forward for Britain is. If you accept that there may be circumstances in which you have to go beyond 28 days and if you accept then as a precautionary principle you should have the power in legislation to do so, then what you've got to do in my view is convince people that you've got in place all the protections against the possibility that there could be arbitrary treatment of the individual. Now an independent reviewer, parliamentary accountability, parliamentary scrutiny, judicial oversight, in fact the application coming not just from the police but from the DPP and from the Home Secretary, gives you a sense that none of these things would be done lightly. They would only be done in the rarest of circumstances when there was a real problem that had to be dealt with.

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