Britain: Mosque committees could be fined or jailed under powers proposed to allow police temporarily to close places of worship used by extremists

Richard Ford:

The proposal came as the Home Office signficantly watered down plans to make it a criminal offence to praise terrorist attacks. The climbdown came three weeks after Charles Clarke published a new offence of glorifying terrorist acts.

The Home Secretary stood by plans to allow police to detain terror suspects for up to three months, but was at the centre of a contempt-of-court row after publishing a justification of the new powers, which included three cases yet to be tried.

Lawyers said that the contents, under the headings “sub judice”, could risk prejudicing some of the country’s highest-profile terror trials.

Last night the Home Office said there was no question of it issuing material that might prejudice trials and said the Crown Prosecution Service had seen the paper and concluded that it was not prejudicial.

But a Home Office spokeswoman said the paper was the responsibility of the Metropolitan Police, which was aware it was going to be published.

Under the plans to rid places of worship of “hate preachers”, the Government is adopting a two-stage approach to try not to offend Muslims. Police would obtain a criminal order against the trustees or registered owner of a place of worship requiring them to take steps to stop extremist behaviour. If they failed to act they would be guilty of a criminal offence which would attract a fine or jail term, neither of which has been specified.

Police could apply to the court for a “restriction of use” order that could temporarily close all or part of the premises.

The consultation paper said the power would be a last resort and that taking action against extremism via temporary closure of places of worship was unlikely by itself to stop the radicalisation of young people. It said that extremists who move between different places of worship were much harder to monitor.

Mr Clarke signalled his climbdown over the offence of glorifying terrorism after three weeks in which the proposed legislation has come under strong criticism.

The offence of glorifying terrorism will still feature in a Terrorism Bill, to be published next week, but it will have to be proved that the person making the statement intended to incite further terrorist acts.

Critics had said that the previous wording was too wide. It would have applied to terrorist acts in the past 20 years and any historic terror incident put on a list compiled by the Home Secretary of the day.

The list has now been abandoned after criticism that it would ignite a debate centred on one person’s freedom fighter being another’s terrorist.

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