CPS kicks out Police request to keep North West 12 for lack of any evidence
As anticipated The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have decided there was insufficient (or any evidence) evidence to press charges - or to convince magistrates to allow police to hold the North West 12 any longer.
It appears the one British resident and citizen is therefore free to go his merry way the other 11 are now in UK Border Agency custody and will almost certainly be deported.
However the 11 Pakistani nationals (complete with funny names, funny beards, brown skins and who are Muslims and have quite legal visas and other documentation ) have hit Catch 22 of the Home Office.
The kebab loving Home Secretary whose expenses claims make such exciting reading has considerable powers to deport foreign nationals whose presence is "not conducive to the public good" - and hard criminal evidence neded in a UK court is not needed.
The cases will now end up ith the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, which in essence a national security tribunal because it can (and you can be sure will) hear evidence in secret.
Mohammed Ayub, who represents 3 of the North West 11 says : "After 13 days in custody, during which no evidence of any wrongdoing was disclosed, they have now been released without charge."
"Our clients have no criminal history, they were here lawfully on student visas and all were pursuing their studies and working part-time. Our clients are neither extremists nor terrorists."
At the time of the raids Gordon Brown (Prime Minister) stated :"We have been investigating a major terrorist plot and we have got to act early. Our first concern is always the safety of the public.''
"It is right that we took the urgent action that we did over the course of yesterday.
"We are dealing with a very big terrorist plot. We have been following it for some time.
PS. Lord Carlile of Berriew QC will waste his time , and even more public money looking at the case as part of his ongoing role as independent reviewer of terrorism laws to say that everything was done leally etc, etc., .
2 comments:
Their crime is having been born in the wrong place. Pakistan is a country where for most people each day is a struggle to survive. They overcame everything to come here to study even if it meant traveling half way round the globe. They complied with all the arduous and lengthy requirements of immigration procedure to enter and remain legally. To do this they will have had to pay student fees about ten times the going rate for domestic students. They have spent almost two weeks detained, uncertain of whether they would ever get out, treated like criminals, with no trial, no charge, no jury and as we now know, no evidence.
They are entirely innocent. We know this, not because their lawyer says so (he would, wouldn't he) but because unlike the average citizen about whom we can't be sure, each of these nine has had his entire living quarters, his computer, and his mobile phone searched and has been interrogated for an extraordinary two weeks, every day in all likelihood, by the British counter-terrorist police and not a scrap of evidence has been found with which they could be charged, nor even with which they could be smeared in the media. They will have had to account for themselves and every detail of their movements in a way that is consistent with all the available data including internet activity and the penetrating apparatus of surveillance, much of it hidden, which surrounds us everywhere we go in public. How many of us have been subjected to that level of scrutiny? That is how many of us can really guarantee the public of our innocence. These people have broken no law.
To do this to nine innocent men, any decent police officer would surely feel embarrassed and contrite. What do they take their job to be? How do they imagine themselves worthy of a salary? But the police as an institution are incapable of apology. That would be to acknowledge mistake or even guilt. Instead of offering apology or even compensation for this grotesque act of state bullying and this violation of human rights motivated by a self-serving need on the part of the executive to distract public attention from other abuses of power, including the vile manslaughter and attempted cover-up of another innocent man in London exposed by the footage of a passing public-spirited merchant banker, and the widespread expenses cheating by our representatives, the government now proposes to tear these unfortunate students from their lives completely and return them brutally to their native land, denying them the freedom we all enjoy to pursue our dreams, by dint of the simple fact of where we were born.
What justice is there in this? The executive is now punishing people without regard to law or a jury for the simple reason that they committed the grave error of being innocent. It is no longer permitted to embarrass the Home Office by remaining within the constraint of the law. What gross misconduct is this by our servants and deputies! What an abuse of power! How the legitimate public interest stands diminished before us in this cynical and petty spectacle carried on by those who, we need to remind ourselves, have the sole duty of applying our laws, not judging and punishing to suit itself! How the authority of the government in this ever-more ridiculous pantomime is reduced to a travesty!
The emperor has no clothes, so he kicks the most powerless individuals in his immediate environment to make himself feel better. How petty these tyrants have become! What a disgrace to decency! What an abomination and desecration of the sovereignty and long tradition of freedom into which every native of this land was born!
The excuse for this is the ever more weary reason of "national security". How convenient that nothing more need be said to support this opaque formulation. But in truth no nation is secured by this conduct. As a people our unity is destroyed by the usurpation of the legislative function by an executive determined to take on the power of sovereignty which rightly belongs to us all.
It falls to Winston Churchill to remind us from the grave of those freedoms the Home Secretary claims to protect. Let's hear it once again from the old imperial war dog, speaking in a time of immeasurably greater stress, when this country really did face an existential threat: 1943.
"The power of the Executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist."
How long must we continue to be subjected to these tyrants who wage war among us all, just as they wage war against the people of the world, in the service of their corporate masters?
Aw c'mon anon, tells us what you really think.
Re. yr Churchill quote, Labour legislated Control Orders (synopsis simple(??) here full monte here) derogating from the ECHR before the 2005 election.
So you can thank the UK citizens who turned out to vote Labour for that one and our continuing subjection to "these tyrants".
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