Douglas Carswell's Blog

What should we think of control orders?

Expect to hear lots of discussion about control orders in the coming months. A control order allows a government minister to restrict an individual's liberty for the purpose of "protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism". Basically, seemingly nasty people who might want to do us harm – but against whom there isn’t apparently evidence to lock up – can be put under a sort of house arrest.

On one side of the argument are those who say this is the sort of thing they do in Burma, it curtails individual liberty, the state is hopelessly incompetent etc etc. On the other hand, there are those who say that control orders are unavoidable, if we want to keep Britain safe from Islamic extremists.

Me? What do I think? I don’t know - despite having pondered long and hard.  There are people I respect making good points on both sides of the debate. However, with the issue coming before Parliament soon, I’ll need to make up my mind. 

What worries me about control orders most is that they seem to be a consequence of what happens when you give judges too much power – or rather, when you rely on judicial activism to protect individual liberty.  Judicially decreed liberty is not freedom. 

Control orders exist despite – and specifically in contravention of - the European Convention on Human Rights. Perhaps human rights rules are not the cozy guarantee of civilized norms and individual freedoms that well-remunerated lawyers imply. Instead human rights rules turn out to be a vague charter, open to subjective interpretation by people who don’t give a damn what the rest of us think.

Second, would we really need control orders at all, if the judiciary did not actively prevent the British state from deporting foreign trouble-makers? Most of those against whom control orders were first made were not even British citizens. Prevented from deporting them, and unable to detain them in prison, the government seemed pushed into inventing control orders as an alternative.  

Our activist judges have often seemed quick to allow people to remain in Britain who should, perhaps, have been deported. Might it be that the consequence of granting such people liberty to remain in Britain is to inevitably diminish the liberties of all Britons? 

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