John Wadham, director of Liberty:

"People arrested under the terrorist legislation are in real danger of losing their right to a fair trial, and of having their reputation and lives destroyed regardless of their guilt or innocence.

"The addition of government, MI5 and media spin to the news of arrests makes it much more difficult for juries in trials to concentrate on evidence (or the lack of it). Sometimes stories of arrests are linked with completely unrelated alleged threats - and seem to tie in all too neatly with the government's media agenda. The stories of charges not pursued or dropped never garner the same attention.

"Those caught up in the snare of our draconian terrorist legislation are now all presumed guilty. Are our memories so short that we no longer remember the long list of those Irish people like the Birmingham 6 who were wrongly imprisoned in the moral panic of the 1970s and 1980s?"

"We must not risk a situation where the possibility of a fair trial is so eroded that we cannot safely acquit the innocent and convict the guilty. Government, the police and the security services should be seeking to avoid such a disastrous situation, not make it more likely.

"The guardian of the rights of suspects on arrest in these circumstances is the Attorney General, who has to act in both the public interest and the interests of the government at different times of the same day. However hard he may try, is it realistic to expect a member of the government in these circumstances to be able to take on such considerable forces? Maybe suspects need a new institutional champion.