'Civil Liberties are for Everyone' - worth a comment or two

A really good comment piece appeared in the Guardian today - Natasha Walter's 'Civil Liberties are for everyone' http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/natasha_walter/2007/12/its_more_than_40_years.html. Walter makes the incredibly important point that the most forceful demonstrations of the erosion of civil rights and liberties by recent developments in the power of the state are often to be found in cases involving individuals whose 'plight' in terms of rights and liberties is unlikely to generate much public sympathy. She provides the example of self-styled 'lyrical terrorist' Samina Malik and the acquitted 'Ricin plot' terror suspect Mustapha Taleb. But in a thoughtfully written and insightful passage about the deprivation of liberty and 'Kafkaesque' systems within which certain individuals who are not 'like us' can find themselves, Walter also rightly highlights that it is not simply those whose reputations are tarnished by association with terrorism or other serious criminal activity whose rights and liberties are subjected to such systemic debasement: it is also the experience of the thousands of asylum seekers who continue to be subjected to arbitrary detention in Britain. Walters writes:


"Although the government says it only detains children or victims of torture under exceptional circumstances, today I could take you to meet children who have been locked up for weeks, and women who bear the marks of torture on their bodies and in their minds - with no idea when they will be released or deported - sitting in fear in these detention centres. Such people are silenced. They are pushed to the margins of all our debates, and when we talk about "our" civil liberties and our human rights these people, who are not "us", hardly seem to figure."


Although conditions apparently vary between centres, (See for example, ICAR 2007: 11-12. http://www.icar.org.uk/bob_html/04_iac_briefings/Detention_of_asylum_seekers_in_the_UK_June_2007.pdf) many horrific aspects of the detention of asylum seekers are regularly highlighted by well plugged in advocate groups such as Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) http://www.biduk.org/, as well as in a growing number of highly critical reports on conditions of detention which have been issued by by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Ann Owers. (See for instance the report on an unannounced inspection of Harmondsworth, July 2006 http://inspectorates.homeoffice/.gov.uk/hmiprisons/inspect_reports/irc-inspections.html/Harmondsworth1.pdf?view=Binary)

Asylum seekers continue to be detained in significant numbers, largely in purpose built immigration detention centres, but also in conventional prisons. According to the Home Office's most recent figures (29th September 2007), the number of asylum seekers held in detention centres solely under Immigration Act powers (i.e. who have never been tried and convicted for any crime) is 1625, amongst whom there are 55 children. (See http://www.homeoffice./gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/asylumq307.pdf). These figures exclude 'persons detained in prison establishments under sole immigration powers', which have inexplicably 'been unavailable since March 2006'.

With Walters, I certainly agree that 'Civil liberties must be for everyone, or we will find one day that they are for nobody.' Whether as subject to the measures of the ever restrictive UK asylum system, or to the expanding anti-terrorism regime, the incarceration of certain groups as homo sacer (to adopt Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's definition of the concept): somehow stripped of their social beingness and relegated to a status beyond the normal operation of the law in a 'state of exception', provides a common condition through which to classify these groups that illustrates Walters point well. However, I also think it is also rather indicative of the nature of the dominant political discourses surrounding both 'asylum' and 'terrorism' that a journlistic argument constructed via a joint reference to both of these categories should seemingly read so logically and common sensically. Of course Walter's shift from anti-terrorism to a concern with the control measures to which asylum seekers are subjected does pivot around her analysis of Mustapha Taleb:

'If few people have bothered to listen to his frustration with the maze in which he finds himself, I think that's because we are reluctant to extend to alien immigrants - even though he had legal status here as a refugee - the same right to justice we believe is due to us.'

However, this embodied articulation of an 'immigrant-terrorist suspect other' also serves as a central point at which far more generalised and otherwise distinct categories, 'asylum' and 'terrorism', are knitted together, with reference to a concern for the denial of rights/civil liberties. There is certainly evidence that a significant proportion of the respondents to Walter's piece accept the association. For example the poster Markmyword49 responds:

'It's not just asylum seekers and "terrorists" that are detained without trial for months. So are what can be described as "normal" people charged with criminal offences. I worry much more about holding those people without trial than asylum seekers and terrorists.'

Even when a sentiment is expressed in opposition to the control measures and/or negative political rhetoric surrounding asylum, it is significant to note that the close association between 'asylum' and 'terrorism' still does not seem to be questioned. Although rather implicitly, a post from respondent PeterGuillam, perhaps comes the closest of all, however, to challenging the relationship:

'As soon as we say that "bad people"s' civil liberties can be eroded so long as "normal people" retain theirs then the battle is lost because government can then keep shifting the boundaries of what is normal and what isn't; and in any particular case will find enthusiastic cheerleaders for the denial of rights to that particular group.'

What I'm interested in therefore in my reading of this article and its responses, is that a close association would seem to be evident between dominant discourses surrounding 'asylum' on the one hand, and surrounding 'terrorism' on the other, and that their joint articulation would appear to be 'sedimented' - as if rather uncontroversial and settled. But, if this is the case, I would suggest that the best political strategy would not, first and foremost (if at all) be to seek to dissassociate 'asylum' and 'terrorism' through an appeal 'responsible' journalism (e.g. by warning columnists such as Natasha Walter of what a worry their regular collocation in the media might be). On the contrary, perhaps it is to take a lead from Walter and her respondent PeterGuillam, in reading the joint articulation of these discourses differently - against the grain and subversively, as it were: emphasising the discursive link between 'asylum' and 'terrorism' in order to harness opposition to it to a set of other strategic issues highlighting a broader injustice (e.g. the State's erosion of human rights). In the process, we might hope that the apparently taken for granted associations between 'asylum' and 'terrorism' will be undermined. Whether a project invoking civil liberties and a liberal human rights paradigm as its political horizon might stand up in the current climate however, is another and perhaps more fundamental question.