Good news and bad news

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown appears to be heading for a "humiliating" defeat in the House of Commons in his attempt to get approval for a measure to hold terrorism suspects up to 42 days without charge.

Rebel Labour MPs will seize on criticism from the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), which said the Government had failed to provide proof that the threat from terrorism had increased over the last year.

It said it was disappointed that the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, could not even guarantee that the extension complied with Britain's human rights laws.

In fact, Parliament's Joint Human Rights Committee said on Friday that the proposals are "fundamentally flawed" and the government has not made its case.

All of which is to the good, but there is - I usually manage to find one - a downside, which in this case is the reasons that report gave as to why the proposal was flawed.

One is that the government can already hold people for 28 days without charge. (Which I assume, by the way, is where the figure of 42 days came from, 42 being 150% of 28.) Another is that the threshold for charging terrorism suspects has been lowered from a "realistic prospect of conviction" to a "reasonable suspicion an offense has been committed," thereby avoiding, it's said, the "danger of having to release a terror suspect because police have been unable to amass strong evidence." Or, to put it another way, creating the ability to hold you without having real evidence you're guilty of anything. Then there's the proposal to allow "post-charge questioning," currently a no-no.

All of this, the committee held, constitutes a "human rights compliant package of measures." Quite a dark backdrop for "human rights compliance."

I wonder if that backdrop is why there seemed to be remarkably little protest, at least in comparison to what I would have expected, when

[a] senior lawyer for the American government ... told the Court of Appeal in London [last December] that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it

and therefore US authorities could legally kidnap anyone, including British citizens, if they're accused of crimes in the US. A few British business executives currently fighting extradition were "alarmed" and one member of Parliament objected, but on the whole the response seemed rather muted for what would seem an extraordinary (and extraordinarily offensive) claim. Maybe, in light of what its own government has approved and desires, it didn't seem so extraordinary to UK officials.

Footnote: I'll give them one thing, the Brown government needs no lessons on fear-mongering from us: We keep hearing about "another 9/11," but in pushing for Brown's proposals, Security Minister Tony McNulty once referred to the UK facing "two or three 9/11s on one day."