Is there some sort of UK law that guarantees the right of trial to non-citizens/non-residents?

Any detention needs to exist under some sort of legal framework that includes some form of judicial review.

There is a right to a fair trial under the European conventions on human rights. This right is applicable to all humans independantly of where they are from or what citizenship they claim. What the UK tried to do was to opt out of this and claim that it could legally detain non EU citizens without trial. The UK law lords have said that they cannot .

Paul.

I wonder if they realize this will only lead to more killed terrorists on the battlefield. So, instead of a finite imprisonment in overseeable conditions , there will just be much, much less effort to take prisoners.

Sometimes a little reality mixed in with standards helps things. The next people to find a bin laden or hussein after seeing the hoops one has to jump through internationally to bring them to justice... well... they're liable just to go on and toss the grenade in.

Bakerstreet,
your point may indeed be true, but two wrongs don't make a right. We cannot lower our moral standards for fear that others may lower their standards if we don't. The courts have no problems with arresting terrorists and holding them in prison for a few months while the case is built against them. Not having enough evidence to build a case however should result in their release, not in continued detention without trial. There are plenty of charges the government can use against such combatants though and maybe the government should create some new offenses as well just to cover non nation state combatants. It's about time though we state respecting the laws we have signed and the human rights we have promised to uphold.

Paul.

I understand your perspective. On the other hand current laws weren't built to fight terrorists, and frankly the same people fighting for interned terrorists now are fighting new laws to make it easy to intern them. So, our laws rise to meet the occasion, or they are deemed ineffectual and people abuse their power to take up the slack. We're not going to pass laws that allow us to hold these people indefinately, and many of these people will continue their "war".

Nature finds a way. It is a tenuous balance that keeps government in position to make these decsions. When people feel that justice isn't being done, they do what they feel they must to prevent what they see as inevitable. If a soldier feels deeply that a combatant is going to go on and kill, and that the government is just going to let him go, odds are slim that that person is going to make it past the long chain of soldiers necessary to get him back to a court.

You can have these people dealt with institutionally, distatsteful as it is, or leave it to soldiers to deal with such and live with the personal scars of their acts later. That is abuse of our military, imho, when they have no confidence that such people will be dealt with later.

The idea that we will invent crimes or create laws allowing us to hold these people forever is pretty optimistic, given the tone of this blog and thousands like it. That, in and of itself, is "lowering our moral standards", and as you say that is something we aren't prepared to do. In the end, we just hand the nasty responsiblity to brave soldiers and make scapegoats out of them every now and then...

I definitely agree that some new laws are required. I'd prefer to see new laws 'rise' to the occasion though as oppossed to see badly thought out laws which step on human rights. I don't want to see our society degrade into a police state of fear mongering and inequality. There are plenty of positive chages that can be made to laws without the risk of human right abuses and there are plenty of existing laws that can be effective used to fight terrorism. The Uk has had excellent terrorism laws for decades to help fight the IRA and these were never felt inadequate. Indeed these were felt a bit draconian.

Holding prisoners indefinitely without trial and using information obtained through torture to convict them are two steps too far in my opinion.

Paul.