A former terror suspect has criticised government anti-terrorism plans as “rehashing of old policies” which will “disenfranchise” UK Muslims.
Cerie Bullivant was under a “control order” in 2006-07 and said such measures were harmful and ineffective.
But ex-minister Baroness Neville-Jones said plans unveiled by David Cameron on Monday would have a “deterrent effect”.
The government wants to stop extremist Britons fighting in Iraq and Syria and bar those who do from returning home.
On Monday, Mr Cameron announced plans for new powers to control terror suspects, including giving police statutory powers to confiscate their passports at UK borders.
The prime minister’s plans include stricter controls under Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (Tpims), which replaced the more restrictive control orders in 2011.
Under control orders, ministers could place a suspect under close supervision and force them to relocate within the UK. Tpims restrict movement, the use of computers and mobile phones, and meetings with others.
Tpims are used in cases where officials decide a suspect can neither be charged nor deported.
Mr Bullivant warned against a return to a system similar to control orders, which he said were designed to “debilitate your life”.
“It left me with severe depression and it pushed me into a corner where I felt my only option was to abscond and go on the run,” he told BBC Newsnight, adding that he handed himself in after five weeks. [eap_ad_1] He said evading the authorities was “relatively easy” and claimed none of the people who had absconded while under control orders or Tpims had ever been caught.
Dangerous people must be charged in courts and put in prison, he added.
Mr Bullivant criticised government plans to bring back powers to relocate suspected terrorists.
“While the Conservative government are telling Muslims that they need to embrace British values, they themselves are abandoning them with this internal exile,” he said.
He called Mr Cameron’s announcement “grandstanding, the rehashing of old policies, put out as new, so that the government can be seen to be tough on terrorism when in actual fact all it’s going to do is create more of a ghettoisation and disenfranchisement within the Muslim community”.
‘Fair and proportionate’
But Baroness Neville-Jones, a former security minister, said giving police powers to take people’s passports at border points was a “really key and apt thing to do”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 5 live, she also said interviewing people returning to the UK from war zones would act as a deterrent because people would know “their card will have been marked”.
Lord Carlile, former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said on Newsnight that Mr Bullivant’s comments were “misleading”.
He said relocation orders worked “very well” and were “fair and proportionate”.
Speaking about the possibility of stopping Britons returning to the UK from war zones, he said it was “unlawful under international law” to remove the passport of someone who had no other nationality – though it “may well be lawful” to take their passport once inside the UK.
As a result he said there was no way to stop British jihadists returning, so the only options were to arrest them if there was enough evidence for a prosecution, or subject them to a “beefed up” Tpim if not.
The proposed measures announced by Mr Cameron on Monday also included forcing airlines to hand over information about passengers travelling to and from conflict zones, and requiring terrorists to undergo de-radicalisation programmes.
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