HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH ATTACKS FRANCE'S EFFECTIVE ANTI-TERROR PRACTICES

NYTIMES:

France’s much-praised system of using sweeping arrests and aggressive interrogations and prosecutions to combat terrorism violates the rule of law and prevents suspects from receiving a fair trial, according to a human rights report released Wednesday.

... an 84-page report issued by the New-York-based Human Rights Watch, entitled “Pre-empting Justice,” argues that French practices result in too many arrests and convictions based on scanty evidence, putting the country “on the wrong side of the law.”

Specifically, the reports states that the broad and much-used charge of “criminal association in relation to a terrorist undertaking” is so sweeping that it is in essence “guilt by association” that allows the authorities to arrest and interrogate large numbers of people even when they have nothing to do with suspected terrorist activity.

The charge is used in a number of other countries in continental Europe. Spain, for example, uses the charge much more aggressively than France, particularly against the Basque separatist group ETA.

“No specific terrorist act need be planned, much less executed, to give rise to the offense,” the report says, adding that even a suspect’s family members, friends, neighbors and casual acquaintances can be detained.

The Justice Ministry defended the country’s counterterrorism strategy but said there would be no official comment on the report itself.

... Asked by a French newspaper last October why France, unlike Spain and Britain, had been spared terrorist attacks in recent years, Bernard Squarcini, the chief of France’s domestic and police intelligence service, credited investigative, intelligence and judicial methods used after the attacks in the mid-1990s.

These methods “make it possible to neutralize, before they go into action, any group or individual liable to perpetrate an attack in France,” he said. “So we adopt the principle of precaution and preventive action.”

HRW AND OBAMA WOULD CEASE ALL AGGRESSIVE ANTI-TERROR PRACTICES (LIKE THE NSA INTERCEPTS PROGRAM, THE SWIFT SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM; ETC) AND AS A RESULT MAKE US ALL LESS SAFE.

VOTE ACCORDINGLY.