U.K. tightens terrorist sentences
Half of time served not enough for release, new law says
LONDON — The British government said Monday it will introduce emergency legislation to stop people convicted of terror crimes from being released after serving half of their sentences.
The announcement was made after two attacks in London by recently freed offenders. The most recent came Sunday, when an Islamic extremist who had recently been released from prison wounded two people in south London, despite being under police surveillance. Sudesh Amman, 20, strapped on a fake bomb and stabbed two people on a busy street before being shot and killed by police.
“Yesterday’s appalling incident makes the case plainly for immediate action,” Justice Secretary Robert Buckland told lawmakers. “We will therefore introduce emergency legislation to put an end to terrorist offenders getting released automatically having served half of their sentence with no check or review.”
He said terror convicts would have to serve at least two-thirds of their sentences, and wouldn’t be freed before the end of their full terms unless the Parole Board agreed.
Buckland said the new rules would apply to people who are currently serving sentences as well as those sentenced in the future. More than 70 people convicted of terrorism offenses have been released in Britain after serving time in prison, and more than 200 others are currently imprisoned.
After Sunday’s attack and a Nov. 29 attack in which two people were killed near London Bridge in central London, the government has vowed to impose longer sentences for terror crimes and overhaul the conditions under which offenders are released back into the community.
“This is a liberal country, it is a tolerant country,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said. “But I think the idea of automatic early release for people who obviously continue to pose a threat to the public has come to the end of its useful life.”
He said the concern is how to apply new laws to those currently in the system. Britain has rules about what the legal system is allowed to address retrospectively — in other words, what new punishments a law can impose on someone for a violation that took place before the law was enacted.
Johnson added that de-radicalizing people is a “very, very difficult thing to do” and that he was concerned about the way convicted terrorists in prison are handled.
“Do you detain them en bloc, in one group, and try to keep them together because that avoids them, as it were, infecting or passing the virus of their beliefs to others in jails, or do you disperse them and try to stop them reinfecting each other?” he said.
Amman had been convicted in 2018 of publishing graphic terrorist videos online and had stockpiled instructions on bomb-making and knife attacks.
He was sentenced to three years and four months. Taking into account time served after his arrest, he was freed a week ago, Buckland said.
Police on Monday continued to search a hostel near the attack site where Amman had been staying, and also raided another property outside of London.
Officers had been trailing Amman at the time of Sunday’s attack, police said, but were unable to head off the bloodshed in the commercial and residential south London neighborhood of Streatham, where Amman struck outside a major pharmacy on a busy shopping afternoon.
The intelligence think tank SITE, formerly the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute, reported that the Islamic State extremist group claimed that the south London attack was perpetrated by one of its “fighters.”
The Islamic State has been responsible for deadly attacks in Europe in the past few years, but it also has a track record of claiming attacks as its own, often with no evidence to prove it. In some cases, the attacks turned out to be carried out by perpetrators with no known ties to the extremist group.
For many, the attack in London recalled the Nov. 29 stabbing attack, which was carried out by another man who had served prison time for terrorism offenses.
Ian Acheson, who led an independent review of Islamic extremism in the criminal justice system, told the BBC that the risk-management system was “broken.”
“We are going to have to accept that we have to be much more skeptical and robust about dealing with the risk of harm,” he said. “We may need to accept that there are certain people who are so dangerous they must be kept in prison indefinitely.”
But the civil-rights group Liberty called the government’s response to recent attacks “a cause of increasing concern for our civil liberties.”
“From last month’s kneejerk lie detector proposal, to today’s threat to break the law by changing people’s sentences retrospectively, continuing to introduce measures without review or evidence is dangerous and will create more problems than it solves,” said Liberty’s Clare Collie.