Clare Short: Remember the legacy of the Birmingham Six case
Jun 10 2008 By Calre Short
This week, the House of Commons will vote on whether to allow six weeks' detention for questioning in terrorism cases.
The strange thing about this is that almost no-one working on bringing such cases to trial supports it, including the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Tony Blair tried to get the House of Commons to support 90 days detention and was defeated. Instead, we settled for amaximum of 27 days. This is already much longer than almost any other country. For some reason, known only to himself, Gordon Brown announced in the early days after he became Prime Minister, that he would bring forward aproposal for 42 days. Most of us assume that he did this just to prove that he could get something through the Commons on an issue on which Tony Blair had failed. When he made the announcement, he was in the earliest days in Number 10. People were pleased that Blair had gone and were hoping for big changes under Brown. He was at the time very popular. Now he has lost his popularity and lost the argument on the proposal that 42 days detention is needed.
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are opposed to the proposal, as are the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists. As many as 50 Labour backbenchers have said they will not support 42 days. The whips and Government Ministers are now at work, twisting arms, promising promotions, and threatening dissenters to try to get the vote through. Concessions are being made on the face of the Bill, on what would trigger the use of the 42 day power, to try to buy off the rebels. As always when the Government is in danger of losing the vote, the Unionists from Northern Ireland have been offered favours in order to get them to vote with the Government.
Some of the reasons why senior police officers are opposed to 42 days detention are that it will damage relations between the police and the Muslim community because of the fear of miscarriages of justice. The police point out that they need good relations with the Moslem community to obtain the intelligence that helps them prevent terrorism. They also fear that detectives will face pressure to come up with evidence. I well remember, in the case of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, they manufactured evidence in cases when they were convinced they had caught a villain but couldn't get enough evidence to prove their case in court. The danger is that this will happen in terrorist cases. It is sometimes called "the noble lie".
Everyone in Birmingham should remember what happened in the case of the Birmingham Six. The wrong men were arrested because the circumstantial evidence made them suspect. They were then threatened to make them confess. Those who were really guilty got away.
