Challenges of peace

It is odd that the Syrian civil war has been going since 2011, the UK has been directly involved since 2015 and yet it is only now, in 2018, that the Government has come up with legislation to deal with one of the major problems related to Britons returning from the fight – that is, the limited evidence of what they actually did when they were away. A new amendment to the Counterterrorism and Border Security Bill says they could face up to 10 years in prison just for entering so-called “designated areas”.

A civil libertarian would argue that evidence is the bedrock of prosecution: if it’s not there one cannot just invent a law to lock someone up because they happened to be in a country where a crime was committed. Others would say that the existing law has been exposed as weak and outdated, that it is madness to permit someone to travel to a terrorist-controlled area, potentially to join a fundamentalist army, then do little when they return. An alternative might be to render them stateless. Isn’t this better?

Perhaps, but it must come with caveats. A reasonable defence will be possible for those travelling with good intent (aid work; journalists) but there will be a lot of pressure to keep these exceptions as wide as possible. How easy or ethical would it be to prevent someone from, say, visiting sick relatives in a war zone? Having accepted Syrian refugees, European countries will now have to police much travel back and forth, adding to the confusion. Peace, it seems, has its own burdens. As the civil war winds down, attention shifts to bringing offenders to justice and, crucially, protecting Britain from the painful legacy of a ghastly conflict.