Liberty - Protecting civil liberties, promoting human rights

• TPIMs don’t keep us safe – suspects should be tried in court and locked up if they are dangerous.
• TPIMs have replaced the discredited control order regime, but there is little difference between the two - TPIMs are simply a form of ‘control order lite’.
  
• Just like control orders, TPIMs are initiated by the Home Secretary - and the regime still runs outside the criminal justice system of investigation, arrest, charge and conviction.

Even worse, unlike the control order regime, which had to be renewed by Parliament every year, the TPIMs Act does not come up for parliamentary renewal for five years. That means Government no longer has to justify this departure from the rule of law annually, and we’re in danger of normalising what was originally intended to be exceptional.

Liberty’s objections to control orders:

• Unsafe – TPIMs allow potentially dangerous people to live at home with limited supervision. In the past, some of those suspects on control orders disappeared whilst under an order. That risk remains unchanged with the TPIMs regime.

• Unfair – TPIMs place potentially unending restrictions on liberty and a raft of dehumanizing sanctions on people who may have no convictions and who can never clear their name.

• Threat to fair trial –  TPIMs by-pass criminal justice and the safeguards that guarantee fair trial.

TPIMs suffer from the same flaws as the control orders they replace. Successive legal rulings revoked individual control orders and the consequent cost to the public purse was huge. Given TPIMs are equally restrictive the litigation is unlikely to stop now.

When it came into power, the Coalition Government announced an urgent review of the control order policy as part of the Counter Terror and Security Powers Review 2010 (read our response as a PDF). Both parties opposed control orders while in Opposition, but in the lead up to the TPIMs announcement the question of whether to scrap control orders or keep them revealed a deep fault line between the Coalition parties - read Chronology of a car crash? to find out more.

More information

• Read Cerie Bullivant's account of what life under these measures is really like.
• Check this list of MPs to see if yours voted for or against renewing control orders in 2010.