 The government hopes its concessions will head off a Commons defeat |
The government has still not done enough to protect individual liberty in its anti-terror plans, an influential committee of MPs and peers says.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith unveiled a series of amendments earlier this week aimed at heading off a Commons defeat.
But in a new report the joint committee on human rights said the safeguards were "inadequate".
And plans to hold terror suspects for up to six weeks without charge would "almost certainly not be lawful".
Ms Smith told The Spectator she thought the government would win next week's crunch Commons vote on 42 day detention.
But she also stressed that defeat would not bring down the government, as some commentators have predicted.
"I think if it was turned into a vote of confidence there would be massive support of the government, I don't think it would be a problem," she told the magazine in an interview to be published on Thursday.
'Grave threat'
Ms Smith has unveiled a series of amendments to the Anti-Terror Bill aimed at winning over critics.
 |  This report takes paint-stripper to the government's claims that it is installing adequate safeguards  Chris Huhne Liberal Democrats |
These include greater Parliamentary oversight and the stipulation that extra detention powers could only be used in the event of a "grave exceptional threat".
The government argues that the scale and complexity of terror plots mean police will inevitably need longer to hold suspects in the future.
But Lib Dem, Conservative and up many Labour MPs are still thought to be planning to vote against the plans on civil rights grounds.
It had been thought as many as 50 Labour MPs would vote against the plans, but some are thought to have changed their minds after studying the amendments.
The government's case will not be helped by a report by the joint committee on human rights published on Thursday, which said the plans could breach European human rights laws.
The report adds that the amendments offered were "inadequate to protect individuals against the threat of arbitrary detention".
The committee said the description of a "grave exceptional threat" was not tight enough.
'Heavily circumscribed'
Committee chairman Labour MP Andrew Dismore said: "The government has talked of a major emergency, the 'nightmare scenario' of simultaneous plots across Britain or two 9/11s at once.
"Yet the amendments tabled by the government provide for possible events falling well short of that."
The report also said requiring the home secretary to declare publicly there was a serious enough emergency to justify the powers was not much of a safeguard without independent scrutiny.
And allowing Parliament to vote on the individual case within seven days - another concession - would make little difference as any debate would be "heavily circumscribed by the risk of prejudicing future trials".
The committee says the proposals should be abandoned and instead the government should set out how it would opt out of human rights obligations, should there be an "emergency threatening the life of the nation".
It concluded: "No amount of additional parliamentary or judicial safeguards can render the proposal for a reserve power of 42 days' pre-charge detention compatible with the right to liberty in Article 5 of the ECHR (European Convention of Human Rights)."
For the Liberal Democrats, Chris Huhne said: "This report takes paint-stripper to the government's claims that it is installing adequate safeguards for the use of 42 days of detention without charge."
He said the extension would be "draconian" and "nearly four times as long as in comparable English-speaking countries". Technorati Tags: anti-terror, gordon brown, terror bill, anti-terror bill, liberty
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