Well, well. I’m not holding my breath, but the Observer’s announcement on Sunday that “The scrapping of control orders for terror suspects moved a step closer last night when … senior Whitehall security sources broke ranks to reveal that MI5 was ‘not wedded’ to keeping the contentious regime” is promising.

 

A form of virtual house arrest, control orders were introduced in 2005 after the government’s immediate post-9/11 response to dealing with foreign “terror suspects” — imprisoning them in Belmarsh without charge or trial, on the basis of secret evidence — was ruled illegal by the Law Lords. In recent years, their use was expanded to include British nationals, as well as foreign nationals, who have often been subjected to a form of extrajudicial “internal exile,” obliged to move hundreds of miles from their homes, as well as being subjected to strict curfews, tagging, a requirement to report to the security services at all times of the day and night, the vetting of all visitors, a ban on the use of computers and mobile phones, and the chance that Home office personnel could raid their homes at any time.

 

However, the continued existence of control orders has been under threat since June 2009, when the Law Lords ruled that imposing them breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, because a suspect held under a control order is not given “sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions to the special advocate assigned to him.”

 

Although the control order regime requires Parliamentary support to exist, being renewed in the House of Commons on an annual basis, this year the Liberal Democrats were determined to bring it to an end, voting en masse to repeal the legislation, and as a result the abolition of control orders was central to their outspoken position on civil liberties, and was something that they were intent on fulfilling, along with the repeal of the 28-day period of pre-trial detention for suspects held within the normal bounds of the law.

 

Last week, as I explained in detail in a previous article, a rift within the government opened up when it was revealed that home secretary Theresa May had been spooked by the spooks, and was changing her mind about dropping control orders, and that Jonathan Evans, the new head of MI5, had also had a quiet word with David Cameron about the perceived importance of control orders to the security services.

 

This prompted Ken Macdonald, the Liberal Democrat peer appointed by Theresa May to oversee the review of Labour’s counter-terrorism legislation, to write to the home secretary, “warning that he would publicly denounce any decision to retain control orders,” leading to a public belittling of Macdonald in return, when May used a BBC appearance to state that, although she “thought it appropriate that someone externally should look at it and say they have looked at the right questions and talked to the right people … ultimately, the decision on what is in place in terms of our counter-terrorism legislation is a decision for government.”

 

Despite this, other opponents lined up behind Ken Macdonald — including energy secretary Chris Huhne, an outspoken critic as a Liberal Democrat in opposition, justice secretary Ken Clarke and the maverick anti-torture MP David Davies, who told the government that he expected 50 Tory and Lib Dem MPs to vote against the government if a decision was taken to keep control orders.

 

Given that the Liberal Democrats are increasingly seen — by their own party members, and by the public in general — as the losers in this coalition, I would be surprised if Nick Clegg can afford to let control orders slip, as he did with his flagship promise not to raise university tuition fees. This, of course, was recently shot to pieces with the government’s announcement that universities will be allowed to double or triple their fees, leading Aaron Porter, the president of the National Union of Students, to tell the BBC that the NUS will “chase down” any Liberal Democrats voting for the rise in fees.

 

In conclusion, then, this Saturday night leak from Whitehall to the Observer may well be significant, although it should be noted, in closing, that it does nothing to address the plight of other “terror suspects,” who are also held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence — either on deportation bail, where the constraints on their liberty are remarkably similar to control orders, or in other cases, in prison.

 

Unlike those on control orders, these men are facing deportation to their home countries — including Algeria and Jordan — on the basis of flimsy “memoranda of understanding” (or, in Algeria’s case, nothing more than a verbal agreement), which are supposed to guarantee that they will be treated humanely, even though these agreements have been widely criticized for being unreliable, and for being nothing more than a cynical attempt by Western countries to undermine their obligations, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

 

For these men, the Law Lords’ intervention regarding the use of secret evidence in control orders has not been extended, and they remain trapped — in their homes or in prison — without charge or trial, and on the basis of secret evidence, with few MPs prepared to follow up on the Early Day Motion submitted by Diane Abbott MP in March 2009, which called for an end to the use of secret evidence in all cases related to allegations of terrorism, and a return to the guiding principle of all countries that like to claim that they are civilized: the right to be charged and tried in an open court.

 

While we await the findings of the counter-terrorism review headed by Ken Macdonald, let us not forget those for whom justice still seems to be an unattainable dream.

Andy Worthington is a Senior Researcher for Cageprisoners. He is also the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the new documentary, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Visit his website here.