Anti-terrorism legislation causes concern

The Human Rights Commission has "substantial concerns" about the proposed anti-terrorism legislation published last December …

The Human Rights Commission has "substantial concerns" about the proposed anti-terrorism legislation published last December by the Minister for Justice.

In a commentary on the Bill, which has been seen by The Irish Times, the commission said its definition of terrorism was far too wide, it did not incorporate protections contained in the European Convention on Human Rights, and argued it should lapse after a period of one to three years.

The Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Bill is intended to give effect to an EU Framework Decision on measures to combat international terrorism in the wake of September 11th.

The Human Rights Commission, set up under the Good Friday agreement, has a remit to comment on the human rights implication of pending legislation. It sent its comments on this Bill to the Minister in the exercise of this remit.

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In doing so, it said it had "a number of substantial concerns about this Bill". Specifically, it said that many of the new provisions in the Bill go much further than are strictly required by the EU Framework Directive.

The commentary pointed out that Ireland already has a very substantial body of anti-terrorist legislation, mainly contained in the Offences Against the State Acts.

The Government should have assessed the actual level of threat from international terrorist groups before drafting the Bill, it said.

Because this Bill is essentially emergency legislation, and international human rights jurisprudence indicates that such legislation should have strict time limits, the Bill should lapse after a specified period of between one and three years, it said. It should also be subject to an independent review annually.

Various amendments to the Offences Against the State Acts are proposed in the legislation, and the commission proposed that these be accompanied by amendments to the Acts proposed by the Hederman Committee, which carried out a review of the Acts, also under the Good Friday agreement.

The commission's main concern is the breadth of the Bill's definition of terrorism.

"In our view, the definition adopted is impermissibly wide and runs the risk of categorising groups opposing dictatorial or oppressive regimes, anti-globalisation, anti-war or environmental protesters, or even militant trade unionists, as terrorists, with all the legal consequences envisaged by the other provisions of the Bill then attaching to them," it warned.

The type of activities defined as terrorist go beyond what most people regard as such offences, according to the commission, and includes damage to property where there is no threat to life.

"This leaves open the possibility that, for example, the British peace activists who damaged Hawk fighter planes in the 1990s to protest at their sale to Indonesia, or the anti-war protesters who attacked US military planes at Shannon, could be categorised as terrorists for the purposes of this Bill.

"While we do not condone such actions, we feel it would be quite wrong to treat them as terrorist offences."

The definitions are so broad as to include those opposing dictatorial or oppressive regimes, like Kurdish or other opponents of Saddam Hussein or Timorese liberation groups before Indonesia withdrew from east Timor, according to the commission.

To avoid this danger, it suggested that the words "democratic and accountable" should be inserted before "governments" in the Bill. It also proposed that the actions defined as terrorist should involve the use of firearms, explosives or other deadly weapons.

Because Ireland is now the only EU state not to have incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic legislation, there is nothing to counteract the possible infringements of this convention contained in the Bill.

This should be rectified in the legislation by making it subject to the relevant Articles, the commission stated.

The commentary also made a number of specific criticisms of the Bill, including the difficulty of members of the Garda Síochána distinguishing between an organisation collecting money for the relief of distress in, for example, Chechnya, and a group involved in active assistance to Chechen fighters.

The commentary was accompanied by a dissenting view from one member of the commission, Ms Jane Liddy, who said that, instead of being a discursive global criticism of the proposed measure, it should have focused on making the Bill subject to certain Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights.