As part of a new and comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Bill to be pushed through the British Parliament, fresh powers will be given to the police to seize passports from suspected British Islamists and stop them from returning to the United Kingdom, British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced.
He was addressing the Australian Parliament in Canberra where he is on an official visit.
New anti-terror legislation has been in the making since September, when Mr. Cameron announced in Parliament his government’s intention to beef-up the powers of the police to stop the two-way flow of British jihadists to Syria to join the Islamic State (IS) army and back.
This pledge came after the beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley by IS militants, and the identification of the assassin in the video of the killing that the IS uploaded on YouTube, as a possible Briton.
The law will include “new rules to prevent airlines that don’t comply with our no-fly lists, or our security screening measures, from landing in the U.K.,” the Prime Minister said.
Extremist material will be taken down from the internet, Mr. Cameron pledged. “We must not allow the internet to be an ungoverned space. The government will pressure companies to “do more, including strengthening filters, improving reporting mechanisms and being more proactive in taking down this harmful material.”
British recruits - many of them teenage boys - to the jihadist cause, according to security service figures have crossed 500, with around 250 of them returning to the U.K. and enrolling new recruits to the jihadist cause. The new anti-terror law will prevent such suspects from returning to the U.K. unless they consent to face trial and police surveillance or go through de-radicalisation courses.
The coalition partners of the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats have supported the measures although they are unhappy that the Prime Minister chose to unveil it in the Australian rather than the British Parliament, The Guardian quoting Lib Dem sources reported.
Civil liberties organisations based in the U.K. have warned of the human rights consequences of giving law enforcement forces such draconian powers of seize, search and arrest in a new law. The human rights organisation Liberty has described the new measures as being “as unsafe as they are unfair.”
“Like so many of the powers introduced during the so-called “War on Terror”, these measures will leave potentially violent terrorists roaming amongst us while innocent people are subjected to punishment without trial,” the organisation said.
