Terror suspect transition as chaotic as Commons marathon

LONDON - The transition of Britain's eight foreign terror suspects from prison or secure mental hospital to a new life under "control orders" is proving every bit as chaotic as last week's scenes in Westminster, when Parliament wrangled over what to do with them.

One of the men released from Broadmoor immediately had to be taken from his new home to a psychiatric ward. Two of the detainees were homeless, and flats had to be found for them; at one, the police had to break a window to get in, because the keys did not work.

But wherever they are, the men, mostly of North African origin, will be waiting for a knock on the door from a police officer, or a phone call from the Home Office.

When this happens, the bail conditions under which they were freed will transmute into control orders, issued under the legislation, which was finally rammed through Parliament on Friday.

Instead of being detained indefinitely in prison, the men will be in another kind of limbo. Each has specific terms under which they are allowed to live. But all have now been fitted, by the private company Premier, with special electronic tags, resembling over-sized wrist watches, which restrict their movements to a specific geographic area around their homes between 7pm and 7am.

Use of a landline telephone is allowed, but not mobile phones. Friends and relatives cannot visit the homes of the former detainees unless they receive clearance from the Home Office. The security services can go into these homes and search the premises without warning, and the suspects are not allowed to arrange any meetings.

The judge at the bail hearing under which the detainees were first freed did agree, however, that they can allow their children's friends under the age of 16 to enter their homes without having to ask the Home Office.

Part of the agreement was that detainees should have access to a 24-hour number so they could ask permission for friends and family to visit their house. However, police discovered that in fact the number is only operated from 9am to 5pm.

Few Britons are likely to worry about these restrictions, as the opinion polls show.

During the three years they have been locked up, the men now subject to control orders have been depicted as a mortal danger to the nation. But from tomorrow, civil libertarians are pointing out, the same draconian conditions can be imposed on any British citizen, as long as the Government can convince a judge that there are "reasonable grounds for suspicion" that the accused might be planning or aiding subversion. Animal rights activists have been suggested as one target.

LONGEST PARLIAMENTARY DAY IN 99 YEARS

For official purposes, Thursday dragged on to become the longest parliamentary "day" for 99 years. Under Parliament's rules, the "day" does not necessarily end when Big Ben strikes midnight: it ends when the Speaker says that it's over, and after most workers had gone home for the weekend, it was still officially Thursday inside the Palace of Westminster.

So defiant was the House of Lords at what it saw as the Government's destruction of ancient civil liberties that many feared that Thursday would drag on through the weekend. But Tony Blair suddenly came up with a compromise which brought Thursday to an anti-climatic end, just after 7pm on what was Friday in the real world.

Peers were so determined that one, who held a sensitive cabinet post in Margaret Thatcher's government 20 years ago, had the pills he needs for his heart problem biked from his Essex home.

During Thursday night, others brought in camp beds, or settled in the comfortable chairs in the library to catch what they could by way of a night's sleep.

When Michael Howard went across to the Lords at lunchtime on Friday, to tell them there was to be no backing down, the Conservative leader received rousing applause and unanimous support.

One persistent rumour was that it was aggravated by friction between the Prime Minister and Home Secretary, with Mr Clarke eager to broker an agreement, while Mr Blair was prepared to accept defeat, if necessary, so that he would accuse Mr Howard of playing politics with the nation's security.

Some were visibly uneasy about the curious alliance lined against the Government - the Tories, under a leader who was once a hard-line right-wing Home Secretary, the retired judges and barristers in the Lords, the Liberal Democrats, and left-wing Labour MPs peers.

There was the irony of seeing Baroness Thatcher voting to protect the civil rights of suspected terrorists, and even their right to claim benefit - a tenderness she did not show to miners' families in the 1980s.

Her old ally Lord Tebbit, whose wife was crippled by an IRA bomb, was asked how he was enjoying helping to defeat the Government, and replied: "Not much. I don't like terrorists."

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When the parliamentary games were over, it only remained for both sides to claim that they had won.

Mr Blair's argument is that the Government did not want to bring in a new anti-terrorism law this close to an election, but was forced by a Law Lords ruling that the detention of foreign terrorist suspects in Belmarsh and Broadmoor was illegal.

The men had been locked up on the instructions of the former home secretary, David Blunkett, because the intelligence services believe that they are dangerous, but do not want to take the evidence to a court for fear of giving away too much about their operations. The men could not be returned to their home countries, where they would be at risk of torture, and consequently were being held indefinitely without charge.

The Lords ruled that this was discrimination, because only foreigners, many from countries with poor civil rights records, could suffer this fate.

The Bill that finally became law at about 7.21pm on Friday (UK time) meets the Law Lords' objections, because the control orders to which the former Belmarsh detainees are subjected could equally be applied to British-born terrorist suspects.

It was also just in time, because the Home Secretary's power to hold the detainees would have run out automatically at midnight tonight.

But it is completely new to British law that the Home Secretary can now deprive British subjects of their liberty by signing an order, without letting them see the evidence against them.

For the Liberal Democrats, the more important point was that people who lose their liberty should know what they are accused of, which is why they voted against the new terror law all the way through, even after Michael Howard had decided to live with it.

The Tories' argument was that such an important innovation needed long, careful thought, which is why they insisted on a "sunset clause" which would have meant that the legislation would have ceased to be law as soon as Parliament had had time to bring in a new law in less of a rush.

The compromise offered by Mr Blair on Friday afternoon gives them most of what they asked for, because there will be a new anti-terrorism law put to the Commons, in draft form, later in the year. It will be accompanied by a report from an independent regulator on how the control orders imposed on the former Belmarsh prisoners have worked.

- Independent