Rebuttal to the Government response to the epetition on the erosion of civil liberties

The petition statement:

Remove legislation that curtails our freedom to decide things that only affect ourselves; repeal legislation whose costs are out of all proportion with the tiny amount of risks they reduce; restore our legal safeguards: do not sacrifice the rights of British citizens on the alter of anti-terrorism legislation - you only allow the terrorists to win if you destroy the things that make this a good place to live in.

The HMG Statement:

Thank you for your petition dated 16 November entitled "Halt the erosion of civil liberties and rights"

Human rights belong to everyone in the United Kingdom and give a very important means of protection for all. The Human Rights Act puts public authorities including Government, hospitals and social services under an obligation to treat people with fairness, equality, dignity and respect. It ensures a level of service below which no public authority should fall. The Act offers a way to tackle problems including substandard care and poor service. You are given added protection by the Act allowing you, as a last resort, to bring a case against a public authority in a UK court.

The Act secures a fair balance between the general interests of society and the protection of the fundamental rights of each individual. Everyone has the benefit of the rights and freedoms protected by the Human Rights Act. Only a few of the rights protected by the Human Rights Act are absolute. They include protection against torture, slavery and retrospective criminal penalties. The Government believes that these rights should be absolute in recognition that such treatment can never be justified in a civilised, democratic society, even where the person seeking to rely on their human rights has committed a crime.

The majority of the Convention rights are, however, limited or qualified. Examples of these rights include: the right to respect for private and family life; and the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Limited and qualified Convention rights can be restricted. The types of reasons the state can give for interfering with the individual's rights include: the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country; for the prevention of disorder or crime; for the protection of health or morals; or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. The more serious the threat is to the general public interest, the more stringent the measures are that can be justified.

Criminals do not always have the unrestricted right to the freedoms contained in the Human Rights Act. Indeed the Act specifically stipulates that people convicted of crimes can be deprived of their liberty and should not be released from prison early if they present a serious danger to others. Those who have no right to reside in the UK can be detained to prevent them entering the country while steps are taken to deport them.

The petition states that we are sacrificing the rights of British Citizens by altering anti-terror legislation. The UK has been subject to a sustained campaign of terrorism for more than 30 years - initially emanating from Northern Ireland but now more international in character - and this experience has shown how the balance between necessary legislation and protecting human rights can be struck.

We have managed to achieve the appropriate balance between the measures necessary to deal with the very real threat to national security posed by terrorism, and the need to avoid diminishing the civil and human rights of the population. All of our anti-terrorism measures have to be sent in the context of our general commitment to human rights and the protection of individual freedoms, including the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 which made the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) enforceable in domestic courts.

My response:

The Government’s response to the epetition seems inadequate.  The response only deals with a small amount of what the petition demands, interpreting it to be an attack on the Human Rights Act.  I personally believe that we need a human rights act, to defend the civil liberties of our people.

What the petition is really attempting to curb is the governments use of unproven, or in some cases ill-proven technologies to meet the ends of national security.  Both the new biometric passport and the national ID Card scheme are purported to stop terrorists from entering this country, or to help catch the home grown variety in the act.

Such schemes tend to offer limited actual benefit to the public, but offer massively increased cost.  When balanced against the fact that such schemes rely heavily on a major government IT database program costing the tax payers billions for questionable reliability (the UK government has, I believe, never had a massive IT project delivered on time and in budget, and when such systems have been delivered, they tend to be buggy).  Add to this the flawed technology which will be used to implement this security and you can sit and watch your basic rights as they swirl lower and lower down the pan!

It seems to me that every time the government wants to push a controversial bill through parliament, they will use the excuse that it will stop terrorists.  Perhaps some of them will, but most of these measures seem designed to control the general population, not the outsiders who might want to do us harm.

Until the government address the real issues raised in the original petition, we as a people can never be truly safe.  Those who have their basic freedoms stripped away from them will become disaffected with this country and this government.  When that happens, many of the disaffected few will consider becoming like those whom the government seek to stop with these measures.  While alleging to stop terror, the government may in fact end up creating the enemy it fears.