THE parliamentary Human Rights Committee report on the government’s latest Counter-Terrorism Bill, before its second reading in the House of Commons, records just how, this time by an attempted sleight of hand, Britain, under a Labour government is being pushed towards a police state dictatorship.
Hansard records that the committee found in point 4: ‘The Bill also contains a number of measures which were not mentioned in the Government’s consultation documents published in July 2007, for example:
• provisions concerning coroners’ inquests involving material affecting national security. . . .’
It added: ‘5. These raise significant human rights issues, but, because of their late introduction, we have not yet had the opportunity to question the Government about them. We are particularly concerned about the insertion into the Bill at this late stage, without any prior consultation, of the measures concerning coroners’ inquests.
‘The Bill provides for the Secretary of State herself to appoint a “specially appointed coroner” and to require the inquest to be conducted without a jury where, in her opinion, the inquest will involve the consideration of material that should not be made public in the interests of national security, in the interests of the relationship between the UK and another country, or otherwise in the public interest.[3]
‘We are disappointed to note that the Explanatory Notes to the Bill contain no analysis of the human rights implications of these provisions. A letter from the Home Secretary dated 21 January 2008, however, claims that “the proposed changes are necessary in order to ensure that we are able to comply with our Article 2 obligations while protecting the integrity of the material in question.”[4]
‘6. On first inspection we find this an astonishing provision with the most serious implications for the UK’s ability to comply with the positive obligation in Article 2 European Convention on Human Rights, to provide an adequate and effective investigation where an individual has been killed as a result of the use of force, particularly where the death is the result of the use of force by state agents.
‘7. It is well established in both ECHR and UK case law that Article 2 requires, for example, that the person carrying out the investigation must be independent from those implicated in the events, there must be a sufficient element of public scrutiny to secure accountability in practice as well as theory, and the investigation must involve the next of kin of the deceased to the extent necessary to protect their legitimate interests.[5] We are alarmed at the prospect that under these provisions inquests into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, or British servicemen killed by US forces in Iraq, could be held by a coroner appointed by the Secretary of State, sitting without a jury.
‘8. We will be writing to the Home Secretary about the compatibility of these provisions with the UK’s obligations to investigate deaths in Article 2 ECHR and will be reporting to Parliament in due course. We think that the significance of the provision in the Bill concerning coroners’ inquests warrants it being drawn to the attention of both Houses at the earliest possible stage.’
The parliamentary committee has just caught out the government and its Home Secretary seeking to slip into a bill, a rubber stamp mechanism for covering up, and thereby supporting and suppressing all knowledge of the activities of the various death squads and shoot-to-kill squads that the state, the army and the police, are now equipped with at home and abroad.
What Labour has learnt from the aborted inquest into the death of the whistleblower Doctor David Kelly, the Harry Stanley inquest, and the dangers that arise to the state out of the forthcoming inquest into the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes is the need to have secret state controlled inquests so that the truth never emerges.
The state is strangling bourgeois democracy.
The only way forward for the working class to defend its basic rights and basic gains is through a socialist revolution that smashes and breaks up the capitalist state apparatus, to establish socialism.
