ECHR ‘stops prisons keeping extremists under control’
Terror tsar issues warning after Islamist double-killer is latest to successfully challenge his treatment behind bars
Human rights law is preventing violent extremists from being kept under control in prisons, the terror tsar has warned.
Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, says jailed extremists’ use of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is creating damaging uncertainty for prison chiefs trying to protect officers and other inmates from attack.
The Telegraph revealed this week that Fuad Awale, an Islamist double killer who took a prison officer hostage, had won a court case on human rights grounds, claiming he was depressed after being put in solitary confinement.
Mr Hall urged David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, to introduce new legally enforced rules that would bar judges from applying the ECHR to prisons’ decisions on how they segregated such dangerous criminals.
Mr Hall said that if the Government did not take action, other dangerous and violent prisoners would bring legal challenges against being separated from other inmates.
He said: “The decision-making about which prisoner associates with which other prisoner is really hard and really important. I don’t, frankly, think that the sort of careful red tape of the ECHR was ever intended to apply to that sort of decision.
“It does put the Government in a difficult position if they allow this judgment to stand and they don’t legislate.
“If they don’t bring forward legislation to say to judges: ‘Look, you simply can’t apply Article 8 to this level of decision making’, then there’s a risk that will happen again.”
Mr Lammy has agreed to pay £7,500 compensation and foot a £234,000 legal bill for Awale, after a judge ruled that his treatment in jail breached his human rights.
Writing for The Telegraph, Ian Acheson, a former prison governor who carried out a review into extremism in jails under the previous Conservative government, said the decision was “emblematic of everything that is wrong in public life today”.
He added: “Fuad Awale’s rights to anything at all must be subordinate to the rights of front-line prison staff looking after him to go home safe after a shift. They must take second place to public protection and national security.”
Awale was transferred to a special separation unit for the country’s most dangerous prisoners after he and another inmate ambushed a prison officer and threatened to kill him unless Britain released the hate preacher Abu Qatada.
He claimed this segregation – designed to prevent him harming officers and radicalising other inmates – had breached his right to a private life under Article 8 of the ECHR.
Awale claimed he had suffered “severe depression” as a result of being denied contact with other inmates.
[…]
‘It risks giving human rights a bad name’
[Mr Hall said] that the way Article 8 was being applied made it “really hard” for the Government to try to work out what rules should apply to “very dangerous” criminals.
The Telegraph: continue reading
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