Blunkett defiant after Archbishop's attack on detention

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, refused to back down yesterday over the detention of foreign terror suspects in the face of scathing criticism from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dr Rowan Williams supported a committee of senior parliamentarians who last week demanded an end to the incarceration, without charge or trial, of 14 foreign nationals.

Speaking before his Christmas Day sermon, in which he will return to the same theme, the Archbishop denounced the detentions in the UK and the holding of British Muslims by the US authorities at their military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Dr Williams told The Sunday Times: "These [detentions] make it harder to encourage and give the right message to those moderate Muslims like our visitors from Iraq who are very keen to establish constitutional principles of religious toleration in what will clearly be a Muslim state.

"If we want to persuade moderate Muslims to sign up to toleration and pluralism of the right kind, anything that gives the impression that we are targeting Muslims is problematic. We have a lot of ground to make up."

Fourteen foreign nationals are still behind bars in the UK under the emergency legislation passed after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, seven of them in Belmarsh, a high-security prison in south-east London.

A committee of privy councillors called on Thursday for the detention measures to be replaced "as a matter of urgency", suggesting that the detainees could be electronically tagged instead.

Mr Blunkett denied that his anti-terrorism measures targeted Muslims, or that the detention of the 14 men could be compared with the situation at Guantanamo Bay.

"I am not interested in the religious commitment or the religious background of those concerned. I am interested in whether they are terrorists," he said.

"We are not holding people in Belmarsh because they are Islamic. We are holding them because they pose a major threat here and across the world. In tackling terrorism, we don't tackle Islam. We tackle those who distort and destroy the name of Islam by using terrorism in a way that was never authorised by the Koran and would never be by decent law-abiding Muslims in this country."

The Home Secretary said the courts had reviewed the principle of the law and 10 of the detentions. "They found not only that I operated my powers proportionately and properly but that we had made the case in terms of the risks posed and therefore continued detention was warranted," he said.

Mr Blunkett said that he would review the system early next year ahead of its renewal in the spring and would be happy to hear from critics such as Dr Williams. "It is entirely appropriate for the Archbishop to comment on these issues and have a view. My view must come entirely from my duty to protect the British people from the danger of attack and from terrorism," he told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend programme.

In his sermon, the Archbishop is preparing to make the unusual gesture of offering a hand of friendship to the Muslim faith. He will argue that Christians and Muslims share some history and can debate theological issues without compromising belief or truth.

The Archbishop is also expected to attack the French government's move last week to ban Muslim headscarves in schools.

Dr Williams, who was enthroned at Canterbury Cathedral in February, has been vocal in his opposition to war in Iraq and has been preoccupied with relations between the two faiths over the past year.

During the war, he hosted a three-day seminar in Qatar of Islamic and Christian scholars.