Terrorism (Detention and Human Rights)

Our Committee’s view was that if one could charge someone with acts preparatory to terrorism under the new legislation, believing that one would be able to do more than that, that would clearly be fine, but the other end of the spectrum—charging someone for not having lights on their bicycle—would not be acceptable. The difficult area perhaps—this does occur—is whether it would be acceptable to charge someone and detain them for, say, immigration offences, which could affect a large number of other people but would not necessarily lead to a terrorism charge. Our feeling was that if the offence was directly related to the terrorism, that is fine, but if one is on a fishing expedition to find something else with which to charge someone as a reason for detaining them, one is getting into a difficult and, at best, a grey area.