Gordon Brown's controversial proposal to extend pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects to 42 days limped through the Commons last week with a majority of just nine votes. In November 2005, Tony Blair attempted to extend the period to 90 days, a proposal that led to Blair's first Commons defeat, with 49 Labour MPs rebelling. Twenty-eight days was instead backed by 323 to 290, seen as the lesser evil. Blair's response was typically bullish: "People will believe parliament was deeply irresponsible." Twenty-eight days, of course, remained on the statute books and constitutes the current limit on pre-trial detention, pending the passage of the 42 days proposal through the House of Lords, where it is is likely to face fierce opposition.

Civil liberties groups have been quick to condemn the bill, not just due to the obvious affront to individual liberty it represents, but also due to inadequate judicial oversight, and the arbitrary powers it affords to the Home Secretary. Prominent pressure group Liberty pointed out that with 28 days we already have the longest pre-charge detention period in the Western world. The Prime Minister has publicly defended the bill by saying: "For too long we have used 19th century means to solve 21st century problems. Instead we must have 21st century methods to deal with 21st century challenges." When pressed by David Cameron on the issue at Prime Minister's Questions, Brown conceded "I would like to have achieved a consensus above party politics. Because it has not been possible to do so the government has to make a judgement - not because it is popular but because it is right."

The source of the Prime Minister's confidence in his moral superiority is unclear. The list of high-profile opponents of the bill is striking. Current Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken McDonald has repeatedly stated that 28 days is enough, and that in fact no-one has been held for longer than 14 days since last summer. Home secretary Jacqui Smith has admitted that MI5 are not asking for more time. Lord Goldsmith and Lord Irvine, respectively the former Lord Chancellor and Attorney General, have publicly expressed their opposition to the extension. Further afield, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner has stated in a letter that if the measures are put in place, they would be 'way out of line' with anything else on the continent.

Furthermore, in what can only be described as a bizarre move, the Prime Minister has neglected to present any evidence that the extra 14 days is actually necessary. Probably his strongest advocate is Metropolitan Chief Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, who said he was "not wedded" to the proposal, but supported some form of extension. This is hardly surprising given that, in 2006, Blair claimed that Islamic terrorism "is a far graver threat in terms of civilians than either the Cold War or the Second World War," the latter conflict being one in which an estimated 60,000 UK civilians lost their lives, while the former one resulted in the stockpiling of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Various MPs have proclaimed their support for 42 days but very little has been put forward in the way of justification, save vague statements about "the scale and complexity" of the threat. It is thus unclear on what basis the public are meant to support the bill.

Equally perturbing is the continued inefficacy of terrorist investigations, both domestically and abroad. Abu Qatada, once described by a Spanish judge as "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe," was released this week without charge after spending six years behind bars - including three years at Belmarsh - with authorites apparently unable to produce any 'prosecutable' evidence during that period. This came only a few days after Whitehall officials were left extremely red-faced following the discovery of two sets of secret terrorism-related government documents left on two different commuter trains. Not exactly an incident that inspires confidence in the expeditious handling of sensitive terror-related information. And, of course, it remains the case that no Guantánamo detainee - British resident or otherwise - has ever been convicted, six years after the first inmates arrived.

Commentators have suggested that the proposal might be an attempt by Gordon Brown to demonstrate a tough, no-nonsense approach to terrorism, and thus increase his ailing popularity. However, a poll in The Times shortly before the vote showed that the Prime Minister's popularity had fallen to an all-time low, even surpassing public disapproval of Iain Duncan Smith during the darkest days of his stint as leader of the opposition. Futher polls, since the vote, have shown public support for David Davis, who resigned as a Conservative MP in protest at the extension, in order to force a by-election on the issue. The bottom line seems to be that we have an extension without evidential basis, that is unwanted by the public, the security services, the judiciary, and international organisations, and yet has somehow cleared the House of Commons. Since 2000, the limit on detention without charge has increased from 48 hours to 42 days.

Forty-eight hours to 42 days. It is worth revisiting the Prime Minister's statement: "For too long we have used 19th century means to solve 21st century problems. Instead we must have 21st century methods to deal with 21st century challenges." Internment was employed to combat escalating violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. In the four months leading up to internment, eight people died; in the succeeding four months, 114 were killed. The political contexts are markedly different but nonetheless, Gordon Brown's characterisation of the new bill as a step forward seems fairly detached from reality. Tony Blair in 2005 worried that people would judge parliament to have been "deeply irresponsible" for not extending detention without charge. It seems fair to level the same accusation at the current parliament for its latest attack on civil liberties. Though one imagines Mr Blair is pleased to see his successor finishing what he started.

London's Ecuadorean community is becoming an important actor among the various organised Latin groups that have come into being in the city to give voice to the least heard. Its activities, which range from the involvement in the Justice for Cleaners campaign to the effort to regularise undocumented immigrants, are gathering an increasing number of participants and are co-ordinated by the newly formed Movimiento Ecuador en Reino Unido (MERU), a network of Ecuadorean migrants which seeks to foster the wellbeing and the integration not only of Ecuadorean citizens, but of the whole Latino and migrant community which resides in London.

Recent developments have highlighted their significance, demonstrating the salience of their presence. Of particular importance has been the visit of Mercedes Panta, an Ecuadorean assemblyman elected in the European circumscription for the Assembly which is currently drafting a new Constitution for the country. Her visit, which took place on 4th June in Elephant and Castle, has been the culmination of a week-long process of visits around Europe, in which the deputy has provided her electors with a detailed exposition of the changes that the new Assembly has hitherto attained. Inspired by the conception of a participatory democracy, Mercedes has put particular emphasis on the achievements obtained in terms of migrants' rights and tutelage, convinced of the necessity to maintain a close contact with the people she is representing. She has stressed very keenly the future possibility for local migrants to appoint an officer of the Embassy of their own choice, and has declared that one of her next struggles will be to insist on proposing that a number of delegates for the Andean Parliament are elected by nationals living abroad. Moreover, she has reasserted the need to strengthen the work of Ecuadorean authorities in London to register more migrants, and have them benefit from access to proper assistance and rights coverage. According to the official registration of the Ecuadorean Consulate, only 800 people are registered, but realistic estimates suggest the presence of thousands of people from the little Andean nation.

Her visit was followed on the 7th by the Second Ecuadorian Assembly in London, held in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). This was a space promoted to discuss the various problems which Ecuadoreans are currently facing in the city. Some tensions have emerged following previous complaints by some individuals who were discontented at the behaviour of Ecuadorean diplomatic representatives in the past, the latter being accused of paying little attention to the claims of the community and of devoting insufficient resources to resolving the myriad of difficulties that plague the life of a migrant. Nevertheless, the leaders of the community have renewed their faith in the Ambassador Eduardo Cabezas, hoping to make collaboration much more intense and productive for both parts. In particular, Juan Carlos Piedra, MERU's coordinator, has suggested a number of initiatives to improve the service of the Embassy. Oscar Jara, representative of SENAMI, an Ecuadorean institution recently set up by the new government to assist Ecuadoreans abroad, has specified the breadth of the reforms implemented in Ecuador and highlighted the preoccupation of President Correa with respect to migratory issues. Ambassador Cabezas has stated his commitment and dedication to help the migrant community and has ratified his intention to make these changes real.

However, the most interesting news comes from a claim made against the BBC by an Ecuadorean citizen. Fidel Narváez has recently submitted a third and final request to the BBC Trust, asking for the rectification of a documentary report entitled 'Indian tribe sues oil giant' shown by Newsnight last November. The report, produced by the American Greg Palast, carries a number of imperfections and oversimplifications: a typical example of bad journalism, where the sheer ignorance of the place mixes with the traditional generalisations foreigners formulate on Latin America in an 'Orientalist' fashion, giving birth to a product of low quality on a country which deserves much better attention. Palast has gone beyond this - his report included outright lies which consciously or unconsciously, had the effect of making his 10-minute reporte more spicy and controversial. Hence, according to Palast, behind 'small Ecuador' is 'big Venezuela', because 'Chavez has given Ecuador a quarter of a billion dollars, and the political weapons to stand up to George Bush', even though this data is unsupported by any verifiable evidence. What is more striking, though, is the attribution of Occidental expulsion from the country to the current President. In fact, the American oil company Occidental was expelled from the country by former President Alfredo Palacio, in response to a breach of contract. But saying that it has been an initiative of Mr Correa (pictured) gives more flesh to the distorted image Palast wants to raise. These factual inaccuracies wrongly imply that Ecuador is externally financed for political reasons, and give the misplaced impression that the oil policy of the current Ecuadorean Government is a simple extension of Chávez' politics.

Many attempts have been made to dissuade Narváez from suing BBC through its formal internal channels of demand, which claim to be rigorously self-appraising and self-correcting. But Narváez, an Ecuadorean human rights activist now based in Cambridge, has not given up his will to advocate a decent journalistic coverage of his country and the intention to rectify what he has reasonably perceived to be a dangerous misrepresentation of the political reality. In this, he has obtained the support of the Finance Minister and the Foreign Relations Parliamentary Commission of Ecuador. It is time for Westerners to come to terms with the political situation of Ecuador, and South America in general, in subtler and more sophisticated ways, and to recognise the presence of these people in our territories not as an impediment or an obstacle, but as a valuable and enriching phenomenon, deserving of respect and legal protection. Sadly, the recent EU norm clearly goes in the opposite direction. By contrast, Mr Correa, is implementing, in Ecuador, policy of 'open doors', with the abolition of any Visa requirement for any citizen of the world, enshrined in the concept of “Universal Citizenship” in the forthcoming Constitution.

The 2006 European Union Fisheries Agreement with Morocco, a gross violation of international law, has permitted European boats to fish in the waters of the Western Sahara, a country that has lived under a violent and brutal Moroccan occupation for 33 years, which has been repeatedly denounced by several international organisations, from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch. With France, a staunch supporter of Morocco´s interests with respect to the Western Sahara conflict, about to begin a 6 month presidency of the EU in July, the Saharawis have recently had to launch a new campaign to preclude attempts to grant an advanced status to Morocco. Perhaps the EU should consider the human rights situation in Moroccan-occupied Sahara before signing any more agreements.

The Western Sahara conflict originated in 1975 when Morocco sent in a 350,000 strong invasion of the territory, bombing the fleeing Saharawis with napalm. Shortly before, Spain, under UN pressure to decolonise the territory, had been discussing independence for the Western Sahara with the Polisario, the liberation front of the Saharawi people, which had been amassing resistance against the Spanish occupation since the late 1960s. Yet in order to avoid war with Morocco, the Spanish government unilaterally passed its colony over to Morocco and Mauritania despite the opposing wishes of the UN.

By 1979, Mauritania retreated but Morocco managed to push back Polisario fighters by constructing a large defensive barrier, known as the “berm”, that bisects the Western Sahara. The longest active military wall in the world, the berm consists of 2,700km of defensive walls, is patrolled by 130,000 Moroccan soldiers, and is reinforced by extensive minefields. It separates the Saharawis living in the Occupied Territories from their families living in exile in refugee camps in the Algerian desert. Malainin, a Saharawi human rights activist, made the three-day journey through heavily mined, open desert to cross the wall in August 2000, fleeing from the Moroccan authorities.

The resistance

Malainin first became involved in active resistance in the early 1990s, distributing information about the Polisario throughout the Occupied Territories, which led to his imprisonment and torture by Moroccan authorities. But he was released after two months due to international pressure, and began working underground to rally people towards protest. On 22nd September 1999 he participated in the organisation of a sit-in in the capital of the Western Sahara, El Aaiun. The aim was to raise sustenance claims and educate people about different forms of peaceful protest. It was attended by thousands, many of whom participated in public discussion groups on various aspects of the Moroccan authorities' systematic discrimination against Saharawis.

Human rights abuses

Yet late on the night of 22nd September 1999 the Moroccan police arrived at the sit-in in order to, in Malainin’s words, “oppress the city”. “They attacked us. It was terrible…they beat us then they took the victims and abandoned them in the middle of nowhere outside the city.” Five days later, on 27th September 1999, the Saharawis regrouped ready for a protest march that was to mark the beginning of the first intifada. Yet Moroccan authorities had a plan to disperse the peaceful Saharawi protesters. “The Moroccan authorities were organising civilians, giving them money but also truncheons, sticks and knives and asking them to attack the demonstrators...the Moroccans wanted to start a ‘civil war’… anyone wearing traditional Saharawi clothing was beaten.”

In this hostile situation Malainin continued to work undercover gathering information on human rights abuses. But it wasn’t easy. It was too risky for him to visit relatives, and he couldn’t stay anywhere for more than two nights. He knew the police were after him, and that if he was caught, he could be sentenced for anywhere between 15 and 20 years. Knowing that he was of no use locked up, he made the decision to cross the wall, arriving safely in the refugee camps in August 2000. He now works from the refugee camps to denounce the gross human rights violations in the Occupied Territories and to raise international awareness about the last African colony.

At the age of 17, Omar (pictured), an independence activist from the generation of the second (2005) intifada, also made the decision to cross the Wall following repeated detentions in which he suffered “all the types of torture that one can possibly imagine”. During the crossing he stepped on a landmine, which cost him his leg. Yet he is still a fervent supporter of the intifada; “it is the only route to peace… the more the Moroccans raise the repression, the more we will demonstrate”.

Yet it is not just young men who are heavily involved in Saharawi resistance in the Occupied Territories. Many women of all ages are especially active, and indeed the most famous Saharawi human rights activist is 2008 Nobel Prize nominee Aminatou Haidar. A former ‘disappeared’ activist, during her first stint in the “black prison” of El Aaiun as a prisoner of conscience, she was submitted to daily physical torture, and “blindfolded for 3 years and 7 months”. Another human rights defender, Sultana Khaya, an icon for young people in the camps, recently lost an eye when her face was heavily beaten and burnt by a Moroccan policeman during a peaceful demonstration.
The future

So what will be the fate of the Saharawi people? Malainin is optimistic. He argues that 34 years is nothing in the history of a nation, especially if you compare it to that of their former coloniser Spain, which spent eight centuries under Arab occupation. Besides, the Saharawi nationalist movement is growing day by day, and “Morocco, as a regime…cannot live for more than 15 – 20 years…not only because of its economic and ethnic problems, but because as a regime it’s archaic…it belongs to the feudal era.” Considering that there is not much hope of the EU fighting for justice for the Western Sahara, one can only hope that Malainin is right.

We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had.

Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling of international law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, the banking crisis, the transfer of wealth from poor to rich, one image is stamped indelibly on this presidency: the trussed automata in orange jumpsuits. It portrays a superpower prepared to dehumanise its prisoners, to wrap, blind and deafen them, to reduce them to mannequins in a place as stark and industrial as a chicken-packing plant. Worse, the government was proud of what it had done. It was parading its impunity. It wanted us to know that nothing would stand in its way: its power was both sovereign and unaccountable.

Three days before Bush arrived in Britain, the US Supreme Court ruled that the inmates at Guantanamo Bay were entitled to contest their detention in the civilian courts. This is the third time the supreme court has ruled against the prison camp, but on this occasion Bush cannot change the law: the court has ruled that the prisoners’ rights are constitutional.

Symbolically the decision could scarcely be more important. Practically it could scarcely be less. The Department of Defense can transfer its prisoners to an oubliette in another country, where the Constitution’s writ does not run. The public atrocity of Guantanamo Bay has provided a useful distraction from something even worse: the sprawling system of secret detention camps the US runs around the world.

We don’t, of course, know much about this programme. Bush first acknowledged it in September 2006. “Of the thousands of terrorists captured across the world, only about 770 have ever been sent to Guantanamo.” Other suspects, he said, were being “held secretly” by the CIA. “Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged.” He went on to claim that all the secret prisoners had now been transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

Several lines of evidence suggest that this claim was false. The CIA appears to have overseen or controlled, and in some cases still to be running, black sites in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Macedonia, Kosovo, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand and possibly Diego Garcia. The US currently appears to be using ships as secret prisons. In just two years the CIA ran 283 flights - which the Council of Europe believes were used for transporting secret prisoners - out of Germany alone. It admits that it possesses 7000 documents about its ghost detention programme. Are we really to believe that all this was done for the 14 men transferred to Guantanamo Bay? In Iraq, the US now admits to holding 22,000 prisoners without charge in its own facilities, some of whom are known to be kept away from the Red Cross and other visitors.

Apart from those moved to Cuba, hardly anyone, so far, has come out of this system. At the end of last year, salon.com interviewed Mohamed Bashmilah, who was arrested and tortured by Jordanian police, handed to the Americans, then flown to an unknown country in autumn 2003, and held secretly by the CIA until he was transferred to Yemeni custody in May 2005. He reports that he was kept in a cell about the size of a transit van throughout the 19 months of his confinement, without any human contact except during interrogation. The lights and a source of white noise were left on permanently. Driven mad by isolation and sensory deprivation, he tried to kill himself several times. Eventually, when it became obvious even to the CIA that he had nothing to do with terrorism, he was handed over to the Yemeni government, who held him for another year until he was released without charge.

Lawyers for some of the men transferred to Guantanamo Bay claim that, while in secret detention, their clients were left hanging from the ceiling by their wrists, beaten with electric cables, yanked around on a dog’s leash, chained naked in a freezing cell and doused with cold water. “The CIA worked people day and night for months,” one prisoner reports. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”

Could it be worse than this? Yes. In 2003, a US official admitted to the Sunday Telegraph that the CIA was detaining and interrogating children. Discussing two boys aged seven and nine held in secret detention by the CIA, the official explained, “we are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children, but we need to know as much about their father’s recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care.” According to another prisoner, the boys had already been tortured by Pakistani guards. A former CIA official told the New Yorker that “every single plan [in the secret detention programme] is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level - meaning the director of the CIA. Any change in the plan - even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added - was signed off by the CIA director.”

Never mind detention without trial; this is detention without acknowledgement. When men and women disappear into this system, neither they nor their families know where they are. The Red Cross cannot reach them; they are beyond the scope of the law. They have been disappeared in the Latin American sense of that word.

Do I need to explain that this treatment breaks just about every article in the Geneva Conventions? Do I need to tell you that - without charges, trials, lawyers, scrutiny or even recognition - it is just as likely to net the innocent as the guilty? In 2006, George Bush maintained that “these aren’t common criminals, or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield - we have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo.” But a new and detailed investigation by the McClatchy newspaper group has found that many of them were indeed either common criminals or bystanders, or men sold to the authorities in order to settle a feud. Who knows how many innocent people are going out of their minds in the CIA’s secret prisons today?

Along with its innocent victims, the US government has locked itself into this system. As the Justice Department has argued, these prisoners cannot be released in case they describe the “alternative interrogation methods” (the euphemism it uses for torture) the CIA used on them, which could “reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.”Like almost everything Bush has done, this programme promises to backfire. George Bush will be remembered not only for the lives he has broken, but also for smashing everything he claimed to defend.

This article first appeared in the Guardian newspaper on 17th June 2008. The article with full footnotes also appears on [Monbiot.com]

A few days before he delivered his now infamous speech Enoch Powell spoke of his excitement to his close friend Clement Jones. "I'm going to make a speech at the weekend", he said, "and it's going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up."

And stay up it has. Forty years later and Powell's words remain as inflammatory now as they were then. For those who share his incendiary views he has been immortalised as the last great defender of a white little Britain. For the rest of us he will forever be associated with ignorance and bigotry cloaked in the thin veil of political respectability. But whatever you think of the man one thing can't be denied - the speech he made that day has come to shape the way we talk about immigration in this country.

As the son of immigrants I was brought up to see Powell as a political bogeyman - the symbol of a narrowly defined view of Britishness that excluded people like me and my parents. And the sad truth is that the perception of immigration as a threat to the fabric of British society has persisted to varying degrees ever since. Whether its talk of being swamped, fear of immigrant crime waves or concerns about the fair provision of public services, for many the threat from immigration is as real today as it was when Powell made that speech all those years ago.

However, rather than holding Britain back immigrants have contributed a great deal to our country. Studies show that migration has had a positive impact on the British economy. The Treasury estimates that in 2006 new migration added about £6 billion to economic growth - around one-sixth of the total growth in the economy in that year. And for decades immigrants have brought with them new jobs and industries. The curry industry in Britain, for example, employs more people than shipbuilding, steel and coal mining put together. Out of every pound spent on food in the UK, 30 pence is spent on curry.

Of course thing's aren't perfect and I'd be the first to admit that in parts of the country immigration has brought with it real challenges. Change and churn has transformed many communities up and down the UK. However, while we need to tackle these issues it is also crucial that we recognise the invaluable contribution that immigrants have made to this country. If we don't do that soon, it might just be too late.

In April this year the IPPR published a major study on post-EU enlargement migration flows to and from the UK. The report focussed on the scale and nature of migration from the new EU accession states and found that the patterns of post-enlargement migration were very different from those of the past. Its conclusion was clear - a significant number of these economic migrants are leaving this country to return home or to work in other EU states which are loosening their restrictions on EU labour.

The statistics speak for themselves. Out of the 1 million migrants that they say arrived in the UK from the 8 countries that joined the EU in 2004, around half have now left. And we're also seeing a major slowdown in the numbers coming to work in the UK in the first place. The report estimated that some 30,000 fewer migrants arrived in the second half of 2007 as compared to the same period the year before. So as migration patterns change, what does this mean for Britain?

Us Brits are getting older. And as we age we are becoming ever more dependent on the labour of these young economic migrants. This is starkly reflected in the country's dependency ratio - the ratio of children and older people to those in work. This ratio is important because as it increases, there is increased strain on the working population to support the upbringing and pensions of the economically dependent. According to the projections of the Government Actuary's Department (GAD) the dependency ratio is set to rise from 61% in 2007 to 73% in 2056. However, without migration the ratio would reach a whopping 82% in 50 years time. Far from feeling threatened by people coming into our country we should be worried about them leaving.

Forty years ago Enoch Powell launched a rocket that has stayed up ever since. His prophesy of British streets awash with blood continues to shape the way we talk about immigration in this country. However statistics show that, in the face of demographic change, it is a drought not a swamp of migrants that we should fear. So now is the time to silence Powell and his influence once and for all. To achieve that we need to say two words to the immigrant communities who have contributed so much to this country. Two words that are more powerful than every sentence and sentiment espoused in Powell's xenophobic speech. Those two words are "thank you." Thank you for the contribution you have made to Britain. Thank you for your sheer hard work. But most of all thank you for staying.

Parmjit Dhanda is MP for Gloucester, and Minister for Community Cohesion.
This article first appeared on Compass.

Left in Vision 2 is an exhibition of work by left wing artists from across Britain and the world. It features Haitian street artist, Andre Eugene, Egyptian photographer Yasser Alwan, Chilean painter Hector Lopez-Kern and East End sculptor May Ayres, among over fifty artists represented.

The show is organised in conjunction with the Marxism 2008 Festival and takes place in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in Malet Street in Bloomsbury, from 3-7 July 10am – 7pm, with a Launch at 5.30pm on Friday 4 July. Both the launch and the show are open to members of the public who are not attending the Marxism event.

Much of the work deals with familiar left themes, such as war and racism, but there is also much that is not directly political: abstract painting, traditional portraiture, surrealist sculpture, art and documentary photography, and cutting edge relational art film making are all included. All of it, however, challenges the values of a society based on exploitation and driven by profit. It will be of interest to everyone who enjoys contemporary art.