By IRNA,
London : Controversial legislation to extend pre-charge detentions to 42 days risks undermining the independence of the judiciary and threatens the chances that terrorist suspects will receive fair trails, a House of Lords committee warned Tuesday.
The all-party Lords constitution committee, which includes former lord chief justice Lord Woolf and the former attorney-general Lord Morris, said that the new law was muddled and gave parliament a “quasi-judicial” role to debate each use of the detention powers.
The concession by the government to let MPs vote on whether to allow extensions in the pre-charge time limit beyond the existing 28 would create a “recipe for confusion”, rather than a “system of checks and balances,” the committee said in a new report.
The report comes ahead of peers in the House of Lords debating the new terrorism law after parliament returns from its summer recess in October.
The extension of pre-charge detentions was narrowly passed by 9 votes in the 646-seat House of Commons, but it is expected to be fiercely opposed in the upper parliamentary chamber.
Last month, former head of Britain’s MI5 security service Lady Manningham Buller warned that the new law was unprincipled and unworkable.
Under the legislation, MPs and peers would vote on whether to grant a temporary “reserve power” for the home secretary, allowing courts to authorize detention for up to 42 days if there was an operational need.
The committee said the government’s desire to increase democratic accountability was “understandable”, but warned it risked “conflating the roles of Parliament and the judiciary, which would be quite inappropriate.”
“Far from being a system of checks and balances, this is a recipe for confusion that places on parliament tasks that it cannot ffectively fulfill and arguably risks undermining the rights of fair trial for the individuals concerned,” it said.
In response to the report, the Conservative’s shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve called on the government to “abandon” the measure and concentrate on things that would make the UK “safer”, such as allowing the use of intercept evidence in terror trials.
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman David Howarth also called for the legislation to be dropped, saying the proposal had “everything to do with politics and nothing at all to do with the struggle against terrorism.”