Gordon wades in with 'terror plot'
When 12 men were arrested in police raids, the prime minister called it a successful operation – has he heard of prejudice?
Ewan Crawford | April 22, 2009
I know he has other things on this mind, and in these circumstances we can excuse forgetfulness, but the prime minister seems to have misplaced something important over the past two weeks.
While he was thinking about MPs' expenses and the budget details, that pesky idea of separating the executive from the judiciary seems to have escaped him.
When 12 men were arrested a fortnight ago by anti-terrorist police, Gordon Brown decided he could dispense with the court system as he announced to the nation's media: "We're dealing with a very big terrorist plot."
Because I am old-fashioned, I had assumed that when asked to comment on the arrest of the suspects, Brown might have come out with something such as: "These are very serious allegations and the police and courts must be left to get on with their job." But in fact just to remove any doubt, the prime minister went on to tell us that the police operation had been "successful".
Now that 10 suspects have been released and their lawyer is claiming that none of the men were terrorists or extremists – even though, as Inayat Bunglawala writes, they face deportation nonetheless – it is hard to judge whether the raids were successful or not.
And this is surely the point – the guilt or innocence of these men should not be determined by lawyer's statements or prime ministerial announcements, but by a jury carefully sifting through the evidence. If it is deemed that there is insufficient evidence for a court case to take place – as was clearly the case at the time the Brown made his statement – then comments about guilt or innocence are totally inappropriate.
This case shows, as previous "terrorist" arrests have done, that the 1981 Contempt of Court Act – the one designed to prevent prejudicial pre-trial publicity – can sometimes be redundant.
One of the big arguments in favour of professional journalism – as opposed to amateur blogging – is that there are agreed standards of fact-checking and an understanding of legal and other constraints placed on reporters.
The Contempt of Court Act says that journalists – and others – must not publish anything that would create a substantial risk of serious prejudice once legal proceedings are active – something that can start at the point of arrest.
In the past this act has been interpreted far too strictly – placing unreasonable restrictions on proper reporting. In recent years the authorities have taken a much more liberal line in deciding what actually constitutes a substantial risk of serious prejudice. Juries have been trusted much more to try solely on the basis of the evidence presented to them in court, rather than what they may have read in the papers or seen on television. But the intensity of the reporting of this story, at a time when the case was legally active, is still a cause for concern.
The detail of the case – the alleged activities undertaken by the suspects, their backgrounds, where they were supposed to have received their "training" and their characters have all been freely discussed by newspapers and broadcasters. This may not matter in a strict legal sense if we are now treating jurors as adults who can distinguish between press reports and court evidence. But there are other obligations on both senior politicians and the media.
We know from previous incidents that initial police statements, either on or off the record, do not always stand up to scrutiny once the full facts are known. The big fear among journalists seems to be missing out on information that will be published or broadcast elsewhere – but is that reasonable editorial decision-making?
The BBC's security correspondent, Gordon Corera, said today that in relation to the police, lessons needed to be learned in terms of "public presentation". Surely large sections of the media should also be questioning their role in this presentation.
From senior politicians in this government – of all governments – we should expect much greater circumspection when drawing conclusions from intelligence about alleged terrorist activities. We all know the UK went to war in Iraq on the basis of flawed intelligence but once again a British prime minister has been stating as fact the existence of a plot, which we were told was based only on intelligence gathering.