Foreign detainees challenge anti-terror laws

Government powers to detain foreigners without limit under emergency anti-terror laws threaten the values they were designed to protect, the Law Lords were told today.

Government powers to detain foreigners without limit under emergency anti-terror laws threaten the values they were designed to protect, the Law Lords were told today.

Nine men held under the controversial Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act are seeking to overturn a Court of Appeal decision which backed Home Secretary David Blunkett's powers to detain them without charge or trial.

Their pleas are being heard by a court made up of nine Law Lords, rather than the usual five, because of the constitutional importance of the legal challenge.

The judges are headed by Lord Bingham, a former Lord Chief Justice.

Ben Emmerson QC, representing seven of the detainees, opened the hearing in the Moses Room next to the main chamber of the House of Lords.

He said: "Despite the complexity of some submissions in this case, the ultimate issue is really very straightforward.

"We say in a democracy it is unacceptable to lock up potentially innocent people without trial or without any indication when, if ever, they are going to be released.

"We say it is doubly unacceptable for a democracy committed to the principles of equality and anti-discrimination to single out foreign nationals when it is not prepared to apply the same measures to its own nationals."

He said no-one can doubt the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York on September 11 were a direct assault on the values of democracy. They represented a new brand of terrorism - highlighted by ruthlessness and a total disregard of human rights.

He added that the reasons they are etched on the world's conscience was not just that they were perpetrated against the world most powerful nation but because of the massive loss of human life.

"There is an inevitable temptation for parliaments and governments to fight fire with fire and set aside legal safeguards which exist within a democratic state," he went on.

"We can fall into the trap which terrorism sets for democracy and the rule of law by destroying those values."

Mr Emmerson said the fundamental issue was whether the Government can lawfully detain a criminal suspect without charge indefinitely.

He said that by derogating, opting out, of obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights to accommodate a power of indefinite detention of foreign nationals on suspicion alone, the Government had "wrongly adopted and permitted measures fundamentally inconsistent with the core values of democracy and justice".