In 2005 the House of Lords ruled that the practice of holding foreign terror suspects in Belmarsh prison without trial was unlawful. Rather than charge and prosecute these individuals within the criminal justice system, the government brought in the unsafe and unfair system of control orders.

Parliament must vote every year to continue the control order scheme.


What are control orders?

Control orders enable the Home Secretary to impose an almost unlimited range of restrictions on any person they suspect of involvement in terrorism.

Some things you might not be able to do if you are under a control order:

- Leave your house during your curfew which could last for 16 hours a day
- Go beyond the boundaries decided by the Home Office even outside of curfew hours
- Take off your electronic monitoring tag
- Stop the police or staff from the monitoring company entering and searching your home without a warrant
- Use or have in your house any communications equipment, the internet and computers
- Have friends or family to your home unless approved by the Home Office. This approval can be removed at any time.


Based on suspicion and secret intelligence, the controlee does not know the accusation or case against them and is powerless to dispute it or show their innocence.

The use of this secret evidence was ruled by the House of Lords in June 2009 to be a breach of the right to a fair trial for three men under control orders.

The Home Office should now scrap this unsafe and unfair regime.


We believe:

1. Control orders are unsafe. Dangerous terrorists should not be in their living rooms but convicted and imprisoned. A genuine terrorist can easily remove plastic tags and disappear, as some controlees have.

2. Control orders are unfair. Innocent people should not be subjected to years and years of punishment without trial. Control orders place unending restrictions on liberty and a raft of dehumanizing sanctions on people based on suspicion rather than evidence.

3. Control orders go against the British traditions of justice and liberty. They grossly undermine the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial.

4. There are alternatives to control orders which better ensure public safety and respect for human rights. Liberty urges the government to use criminal law and the courts to lock up dangerous terrorists, and to allow the use of intercept evidence in court.



The real cost of control orders

Before being allowed to follow his family to Jordan in July 2009, Mahmoud Abu Rideh was punished without charge in Belmarsh prison for three years and then under a control order for four and a half years. His subsequent breakdown and stay in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, as well as suicide attempts have been devastating to his wife and small children.

Read more of Abu Rideh's story in The Independent, July 2009.


The future of control orders

Following the 2010 General Election the new Conservative - Liberal Democrat Coalition Government proposed an urgent review of the control orders scheme in their 'Programme for Government'.

While we welcome a review of the control order regime we urge the new Coalition Government to press ahead with transferring the case files of those currently subjected to control orders to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Once decisions have been made either to charge or release those individuals the unsafe and unfair control order regime must be urgently repealed.

While in Opposition, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats made clear their principled objections to this illiberal regime. The Liberal Democrats pledged to scrap control orders in their 2010 Manifesto.

We urge both parties to stay true to their previous commitments on this issue.

Read Liberty's full Analysis of the Coalition Programme for Government (PDF)