Pursue Prevent Protect Prepare The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism March 2009 The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism March 2009 Presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Command of Her Majesty This is a corrective reprint incorporating the changes of the correction slip provided on 8 May 2009 Cm 7547 £34.55 © Crown copyright 2009 The text in this document (excluding the Royal Arms and other departmental or agency logos) may be reproduced free of charge in any format or medium providing it is reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context. The material must be acknowledged as Crown copyright and the title of the document specified. Where we have identified any third party copyright material you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned. For any other use of this material please write to Office of Public Sector Information, Information Policy Team, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU or email: [email protected] ISBN: 9780101754729 The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism Page 4 Contents The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism Foreword: Prime Minister Foreword: Home Secretary Introduction Executive summary Part 1 Strategic context 1 International terrorism and the UK: background 2 The impact on the UK 3 The current threat to the UK 4 How the terrorist threat has changed 5 Strategic factors 6 The future Part 2 The CONTEST Strategy 7 The UK strategy for countering international terrorism 8 Pursue: stopping terrorist attacks 9 Prevent: stopping people becoming terrorists or supporting violent extremism 10 Protect: strengthening our protection against attack 11 Prepare: mitigating the impact of attacks 12 Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons and explosives Part 3 Delivering CONTEST 13 Managing delivery 14 Delivery partnerships Part 4 Communications 15 Counter-terrorism communications Conclusion Annex A: PSA outcomes Annex B: Departmental roles and responsibilities Annex C: Acronyms and abbreviations End notes Contents Page 5 Foreword The Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP Prime Minister The first priority of any Government is to ensure the security and safety of the nation and all members of the public. While recent events have shown, tragically, that the threat of terrorism in Northern Ireland is still with us, the most significant security threat to the people of the United Kingdom today comes from international terrorism. This new form of terrorism is different in scale and nature from the terrorist threats we have had to deal with in recent decades. It is intent on inflicting mass casualties without warning, motivated by a violent extremist ideology, and exploits modern travel and communications to spread through a loose and dangerous global network. This is the threat on which this updated strategy, CONTEST, is focused. In the six years since we first developed CONTEST, the many thousands of hard working men and women in the police, the intelligence and security agencies, our armed forces, the emergency services, local authorities, businesses, community groups and others have achieved a great deal in their work to counter this ongoing threat. I pay tribute to them. But the threat remains, and is always evolving. We can never afford to assume that the established way of doing things is enough. We are continuing to increase investment to ensure the police, agencies and others are fully prepared, and we will make whatever changes are necessary to protect our security – as well as ensuring we have learned the lessons of recent experience to make sure we have the strongest possible response. I believe that if people are better informed about the threat they will be more vigilant but also more assured, and I am therefore pleased that this published strategy gives a more detailed and wide-ranging account of our response than ever before. It sets out our comprehensive approach for tackling international terrorism – from the international, through the national, to the local. It outlines how we are tackling the immediate threat through the relentless pursuit of terrorists and the disruption of terrorist plots; how we are building up our defences against attacks and our resilience to deal with them; and how we are addressing the longer term causes – particularly by understanding what leads people to become radicalised, so we can stop them becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism or violent extremism in the first place. I believe this updated strategy leaves us better prepared to meet the terrorist threat, and to achieve our objective of ensuring that the people of the United Kingdom can go about their normal lives in confidence and free from fear. Gordon Brown MP The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism Page 6 Foreword The Rt Hon Jacqui Smith MP Home Secretary I am very pleased to publish this new version of the UK’s strategy for tackling international terrorism, known as CONTEST. One of the primary duties of Government is to keep our citizens safe and secure, and to protect the freedoms we all enjoy. Tackling the threat we face from international terrorism remains an important challenge. This strategy aims to reduce the risk to the United Kingdom and our interests overseas, so that people can go about their lives freely and with confidence. We have had considerable success in countering the terrorist threat since CONTEST was first adopted six years ago, including disrupting a number of planned terrorist operations against the UK and bringing those responsible to justice. But the threat is always changing. New groups emerge and terrorists continue to develop new methods and make use of new technologies. Learning from our experience over the past few years, we have updated all aspects of our strategy to take account of this changing threat. Working across government departments, CONTEST is one of the most comprehensive and wide-ranging approaches to tackling terrorism anywhere in the world. We set out here for the first time a detailed account of the history of the threat, how in recent years a new form of international terrorism has emerged, and the impact this has had on the UK. We also describe the strategic factors that sustain terrorism, the principles that underlie our response to the threat, our key achievements to date, and the challenges that we will face in the future. In publishing this strategy, our aim is to provide the people of the UK and our partners overseas with as full and as open an account as possible of why and how we are tackling this threat. And in setting out clearly the steps we are taking to protect the public and to prevent the rise of violent extremism, I pay tribute to the dedication of the thousands of people – police and intelligence officers, the emergency services, local authorities, businesses, and voluntary and community groups – who are working together to make Britain safe. Jacqui Smith MP Foreword Page 7 Introduction Since 2003, we have had a comprehensive strategy in place to counter the threat to this country and to our interests overseas from international terrorism. The strategy is known as CONTEST. The aim of the strategy is ‘to reduce the risk to the UK and its interests overseas from international terrorism, so that people can go about their lives freely and with confidence’. We believe that to date the strategy has achieved its intended aim. We have now revised this strategy to take account of the evolution of the threat and of our understanding of the factors which are driving it. The strategy also reflects the lessons we have learned since 2003 and the increasing resources we have made available for counter-terrorism. These revisions will help us ensure that the strategy meets its aim in future. This is the first time we have published this strategy in such detail: we want to be as open as possible in describing the threat we face and the responses that we believe are appropriate to address it. In a few areas only, we have had to withhold information either for legal or security reasons. The document begins with an executive summary which is intended to highlight the main themes in the entire document. The first part of the document then sets out how the terrorist threat to the UK has evolved, the present threat, the factors which are shaping it and our assumptions about how it may develop in future. The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism Page 8 The second part sets out the principles which will govern the strategy. They include our commitment to human rights and the rule of law. They make clear that we need to address the causes as well as the symptoms of terrorism. And they emphasise that partnerships in this country and overseas are vital to our success. Government cannot deliver CONTEST on its own. This part of the document also describes the four main workstreams of the strategy – known as Pursue, Prevent, Protect and Prepare – in each case explaining their purpose, our key achievements to date, what we intend to do next, and the challenges we face. We have also described our current activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and we have summarised action we are taking to address the risk of a terrorist attack which makes use of non-conventional weapons. The third part of the document outlines who will deliver the strategy and how we will measure its impact. For security reasons we have not been able to publish the ‘delivery plans’ which describe in much more detail how we will deliver CONTEST. The document concludes with a section explaining the importance of communications as a part of our counter- terrorism strategy.