Deportation, detention & torture by proxy: Foreign national terror suspects in the UK

Abstract

In many ways his article confronts the Sociologist C. Wright Mills’s famous injunction on turning private troubles into public issues. However, this is a trickier process than usual as the victims at the centre of these private troubles are not children, women, lesbian, gays, the elderly, or the disabled. The victims here are what Stan Cohen has described as ‘impure victims’, in that they are individuals who are suspected of being ‘involved’ in ‘terrorist’ activities. The private troubles these impure victims are experiencing are the loss of many of the rights most of us enjoy (for example, the right to liberty and the right to a fair trial). The public issue that will be examined here is what Étienne Balibar refers to as the reality of the extreme violence of the State in contemporary societies against ‘radically excluded’ individuals. This chapter is an examination of the long and winding road to the Government achieving its over-riding ambition in the war on terror in the UK: the deportation of terror suspects to regimes where (despite diplomatic assurances) torture is inevitable.