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Border Controls and Preventative Counter-Terrorism

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Border Controls and Preventative Counter-Terrorism Notes Introduction: Value Trouble 1. Joppke suggests that what has been described as the essential values of Britishness are in fact the ‘nationally anonymous’ values of applied political liberalism (2008: 538). 2. A dispositif is according to Nikolas Rose, ‘a family way of thinking and act- ing, involving calculations about probable futures in the present followed by interventions into the present in order to control that potential future’ (in Aradau and van Munster 2008: 25) 3. That is shared in terms of them being the set of what Parekh calls the ‘ operative social values’ (see Chapter 5) that are established through a wide- ranging and national debate in the process of developing a Statement of Values. It should be noted that the only purpose this author considers that this process should be undertaken is when it is for the purposes of underwrit- ing what the Joint Commission on Human Rights calls the UK Bill of Rights and Freedoms (see Chapter 5). 1 Pre-Emptive Securities – Border Controls and Preventative Counter-Terrorism 1. Please see McGhee (2008a and 2008b) for a more direct exploration of the UK’s recent counter-terrorism legislation. 2. According to the House of Lords European Union Committee (2008: 25), Frontex has six statutory tasks to: (1) co-ordinate operational cooperation between member states in the field of management of external borders; (2) assist member states on the training of national border guards, including the establishment of common training standards; (3) carry out risk analyses; (4) follow-up on the development of research relevant for the control and surveillance of external borders; (5) assist member states in circumstances requiring increased technical and operational assistance at external borders; (6) provide member states with the necessary support in organizing joint return operations. 3. According to House of Lords European Union Committee, the Schengen Implementing Committee took effect in 1995 for ten of the member states. Germany, France and the Benelux countries were the five original Schengen states; they were later joined by Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria and Greece. In 2001 the convention took effect for Denmark, Sweden and Finland (and also for Norway and Iceland, the other two members of the Nordic passport 180 Notes 181 union). Since December 2007, it has additionally been in force for all ten member states which acceded in 2004 (except Cyprus) – a total of 24 states (House of Lords European Union Committee 2008: 9). 4. The Identity Card Act received Royal Assent in March 2006; the first ‘Identity Commissioner’, Sir Joseph Pilling, was appointed on 14 September 2009 to be the ‘public’s independent watchdog for the national ID card scheme’ (Travis 2009a: 1). 5. The first major policy announcement made by the new Home Secretary Alan Johnson (who replaced Jacqui Smith in 2009) was, according to Tom Whitehead writing in the Telegraph, that ID cards would not be made compulsory for British citizens in the future (2009: 2). According to the new Home Secretary, ‘holding an ID card should be a personal choice for British citizens – just as it is now to obtain a passport’ (in Whitehead 2009: 2). 6. Britain has allegedly entered into a post-‘war on terror’ phase. This was marked by an article (‘“War on Terror” was Wrong’) by David Miliband (Foreign Secretary) in the Guardian in January 2009. According to Miliband, the notion of a ‘war on terror’ was not only wrong but was also ‘misleading and mistaken’ (2009: 1). 7. This is a comment on the potential ‘corruption’ of aspects of the data ‘on indi- viduals’ held in some of these integrated databases. One just has to consider, for example, President Barak Obama’s calls for further investigations into the CIA’s role with regard to intelligence gathered through the use of augmented intelligence techniques and torture during the Bush administrations’ ‘war on terrorism’ to consider just how ‘tainted’ and potentially unreliable some aspects of these risk-profiling technologies, which are reliant on integrated databases, could be. Bringing this closer to home, in the UK, at the time of writing, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was attempting to prevent the High Court (in the name of protecting national security) from releasing evidence relevant to the case of Binyam Mohamed which would reveal that the Labour government knew of the illegal treatment of Mr Mohamed by the CIA in a secret prison in Pakistan (Norton-Taylor 2009: 4). It was reported in the Guardian that two senior judges (Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones) have criticized the Foreign Secretary’s actions suggesting that ‘the sup- pression of reports of wrongdoing by officials’ is tantamount to subverting the rule of law which is ‘the cornerstone of democracy’ (Norton-Taylor 2009: 4). The High Court has ordered the release of a seven-paragraph summary of the CIA-derived intelligence (which was shared with British officials and perhaps even government ministers) which was gleaned from Mr Mohamed through ‘ill-treatment’ while in CIA custody (Norton-Taylor 2009: 4). 8. According to Vaughan-Williams, the Frontex strategies Hera I and Hera II can be described as ‘pre-border surveillance’ and intercept strategies that were introduced in response to unprecedented numbers of African would-be migrants who were attempting to enter the EEA (2008: 67). Hera I (which involved Frontex personnel from France, Portugal, Italy, Germany, the Nether- lands, Norway and the UK) attempted to support the Spanish authorities in dealing with an unprecedented number of Africans who had arrived on the Canary Islands in an attempt to enter the EU in 2006 (Vaughan-Williams 2008: 67). Whereas Hera I involved ‘conventional border work’, Hera II was a strategy dedicated to deterrence in that surveillance planes from Finland and 182 Notes Italy were flown along the coast and deeper into African territory and patrol boats were mobilized by Italy and Portugal off the West African coast with the intention of deterring ‘would be immigrants from making the journey to the EU’ (Bailey, in Vaughan-Williams 2008: 68). 9. Jacqui Smith’s list of ‘Muslim’ grievances included grievances about foreign policy, grievances about socio-economic deprivation and grievances based on perceptions/misperceptions of police and law enforcement activity (2007: 15). On Blair government’s refusal to recognize the relationship between these grievances and extremism see McGhee (2008a: 61–70). 10. See speeches made by Brown when he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in McGhee (2008: 70–1). 11. The government reported that they have put in place what they call the Channel Programme which will be co-ordinated by police and local authori- ties with the aims of identifying those at risk from violent extremism and provide help to them, primarily through community-based interventions (HM Government 2009: 90). 12. According to the DCLG the strategic objectives for the programme (includ- ing national, regional and local dimension) are to develop a community in which Muslims identify themselves as a welcome part of a wider British society and are accepted as such by the wider community, reject violent extremist ideology and actively condemn violent extremism, isolate violent extremist activity and support and co-operate with the police and security services and develop their own capacity to deal with problems where they arise and support diversionary activity for those at risk (DCLG 2007a: 7). 13. One could suggest that this process of increasing the representativeness and reaching deep into Muslim communities is the end point of the recommen- dations made previously by the then Home Office Faith Communities unit in their 2004 report (see McGhee 2008a: 76–8). 2 Building a Consensus on ‘National Security’: Terrorism, Human Rights and ‘Core Values’ 1. It should be noted that many aspects of the Blair administration post-9/11 counter-terrorism emergency measures, as noted by Tony Blair in the media briefing on 5 August 2005 (to follow), have been challenged and overturned in the House of Lords and in the Courts including detention without charge of foreign national terrorist suspects introduced in the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001 and the initial restrictiveness of control orders intro- duced in the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2005 (McGhee 2008a: 18–19). 2. The government has been prevented from deporting foreign nationals if they were at risk of ill-treatment (including torture) in their ‘home’ or designated receiving country; this was highly likely if the individual in question was deemed a terrorist suspect in their home country or deported as a ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist suspect’ from the UK (McGhee 2008a and 2008b). See also Chapter 4. 3. According to Roe, the Giddensian concept of ontological security refers to the individual’s ability to act and to exist with a stable identity; onto- logical security, therefore, allows individuals to go on with everyday activities (2005: 782). For Giddens, ontological security concerns ‘a person’s Notes 183 fundamental sense of safety in the world and includes basic trust of other people. Obtaining such trust becomes necessary in order for a person to maintain a sense of psychological well-being and avoid existential anxiety’ (Giddens, in Roe 2005: 782). 4. At the time that the National Security Strategy was launched Gordon Brown stated that of these other threats ‘terrorism is the most dramatic new threat’ (2008: 1). However, later in the book, in Chapter 6 and in the Afterword I sug- gest that the global economic downturn has eclipsed the threat from terrorism, for example, in the Rights and Responsibilities Green Paper of 2009, the threat from terrorism was marginalized (in fact terrorism was mentioned only twice) compared to the overwhelming emphasis on the global economic crisis.
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