The return of internment?

Foreign nationals suspected of terrorism will be targeted

The Home Secretary plans to declare a state of emergency so that terrorist suspects can be detained without trial.

New anti-terrorism measures are to be pushed through Parliament on Tuesday, as part of David Blunkett's response to the September 11th attacks.

The government wants to derogate from Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) - the article that protects people from arbitrary detention and imprisonment - in order to intern terrorist suspects.

But to meet the specific conditions laid down by the convention the government believes it has to declare a state of emergency. Article 15 of the ECHR reads:

"In time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation [the government] may take measures derogating from its obligations under [the ECHR] to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation..."

Francesca Klug, senior research fellow in human rights law at the LSE, explained to us how far the ECHR allowed for the possibility of opting out.

We also spoke to Dr Mohammed al-Masri, a Saudi dissident who fought for years to avoid deportation from this country.

He said he would have been a natural candidate for detention without trial, and argued that present laws constraining the movements of suspected terrorists were more than sufficient for national security.

'Double standards'

From Belfast, the Democratic Unionist Party's Ian Paisley Junior, told us that the government was showing double standards in taking a tough line on international terrorists, while tolerating what he saw as 'republican terrorists' in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Click on the links above right to hear interviews from the programme.