Shami Chakrabarti: Asbomania - the descent from natural and social justice into mob rule

From the British Institute of Human Rights lunchtime lecture by the director of Liberty

Many of the Government's policies and initiatives, from marching louts to cash points to sin bins and baby asbos, may have been drafted on Westminster beer mats by ambitious advisers. But they reveal an underlying philosophy nonetheless - that the presumption of innocence is too cumbersome.

What of the kids with ADHD or Tourettes who are banned from swearing and set up for inevitable failure? The suicidal woman banned from bridges? What of the mentally ill and the homeless banned from begging under pain of criminal sanction?

Should this behaviour be regulated by the law, let alone mediated by police, local authority and court intervention? The reality of asbomania in 2006 is a new mutant strain of criminal law.

In 1998, ASBOs may have looked like a last chance for offenders to avoid the criminal conviction. Today they appear to provide a short cut into it.

Up to December of 2003, 42% of all ASBOs were breached with 55% of breaches resulting in custody. This suggests that like the traditional criminal justice system, ASBOs are very good at achieving what has never been this Government's stated objective - namely, higher levels of incarceration.

No one could contend that an ASBO has never been properly or proportionately framed against an offender. But the Prime Minister must consider the many ways in which the innocent and the vulnerable may be swept up with the guilty. With the move to summary, arbitrary and loosely defined community justice, anti-social behaviour laws have to date been at best neutral and at worst positively damaging.

The constant arousal of fears and expectations concerning crime and nuisance, the endless recourse to new laws and extra coercive intervention, and the constant preoccupation with home affairs solutions establishing political primacy over education, health and housing... The constant denigration of ancient and modern human rights' values, of the idea of the worth of the individual. This is not the way to inspire respect but merely to attempt to impose it. Let humanity not power be the source of respect for each of us.