Arzu discusses the proscription of the avowedly non-violent group Hizb ut-Tahrir by the UK government and what it means for dissenting voices in the UK
Today’s proscription of Hizb u-Tahrir under the Terrorism Act 2000 is a new low, even for the UK. I wrote on 7 January that the push towards criminalising non-violent extremism was back on the agenda for 2024. Little did I expect that just over a week later existing anti-terrorism laws would be used to proscribe an avowedly non-violent organisation. As this thread from Fahad Ansari shows, the proscription fails by the law’s own failed standards:
Hizb ut-Tahrir is not a terrorist group. It has a history of promoting non-violent struggle and has not been connected with any terrorist plots or activities. It is for these reasons that previous plans by both Blair and Cameron to ban the organisation had been shelved.
— Fahad Ansari ???????? (Stop the Gaza genocide) (@fahadansari) January 15, 2024
Likewise this thread from IHRC Legal’s Abed Choudhury highlights the hypocrisy of the government’s stance, given that it recognises the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir in other countries as a means of persecution:
UK Government intends to proscribe Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) yet recognises proscription of HT is a means of persecution in other countries. 1/
— Abed Choudhury (@AbedChoudhury4) January 16, 2024
The UK has been infamous for punitive anti-terrorism regimes: sets of laws that effectively create a third legal space (outside the existing spaces of criminal and civil law) often filled by (prosecutions and proscriptions of) the demonised of the day. Since 1997 that has been (almost entirely) Muslims. As my last piece stated, since this process of trying to criminalise so-called non-violent extremism circa 2015 started, various organisations have been repeatedly maligned by many non-state actors including think tanks and sections of the media. IHRC was one, Hizb u-Tahrir, Cage, MEND, MPACUK were other Muslim groups also targeted. Oftentimes this maligning has been relentless. In recent days and weeks, the focus on Hizb u-Tahrir and some of those associated with it has been relentless, just see any of the coverage in The Times* if you have access for a brief snapshot. This did not simply create the demonisation required to proscribe Hizb ut-Tahrir today.
This thread from IHRC explains, using its briefing published in 2019 and circulated to various EU agencies and the UN, how political space is shrinking in the UK. They were speaking about things that the EU’s own Fundamental Rights Agency had already been highlighting across the continent: that a combination of ostracization from consultation and gatekeeping, alongside violence and smear campaigns, as well as anti-terror laws was resulting in delegitimisation of not just named organisations but causes often related to them (e.g. Islamophobia, civil and human rights, professions of faith, pro-Palestinian advocacy).
IHRC is deeply concerned by the UK government’s decision to proscribe Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organisation.
The use of anti-terrorism legislation to silence dissent and shrink civil society space has become one of the defining features of the time we live in.
????
1/— IHRC (@ihrc) January 15, 2024
It is a testimony to the utter hypocrisy of the government’s actions today that the responses to this thread contain racist and dehumanising language, including tired tropes accusing the organisation of being ‘literal terrorists’.
Even without proscription the constant attacks and running commentary on Muslims, Muslim organisations and ‘Muslim causes’ positioned endlessly as an affront to ‘fundamental British values’ (another never to be defined term), creates a chilling effect on political discussion and particularly opposition. Mainstream media starts avoiding named organisations for fear of backlash; likewise funders whether private, sector related or governments avoid this informal blacklist of names. All the while negative public opinion is fomented.
During the so-called troubles in the North of Ireland from the 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the UK’s anti-terrorism focus zoomed in on republican acts of political violence. This is summarised in the report of the 2009 Muslim / Irish seminar ‘Comparing Irish and British Muslim Experiences of Counter-insurgency Law and Policy’ organised by Edge Hill University in co-operation with Committee on the Administration of Justice, Islamic Human Rights Commission, Relatives for Justice and Coiste na n-Iarchimi:
A raft of ‘emergency’ measures and counter-insurgency strategies were also introduced by the British Government through the years of conflict, including the Emergency Provisions Act in 1973 and the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1974, the key precursors to the current anti-terror legislative and policy framework. Such measures were often criticised by civil libertarians, human rights groups and others as doing little other than exacerbate the conflict and undermining the basis of the rule of law.
The consequences of these laws and policies were felt most acutely by those communities most at odds with, and alienated from, the state; primarily nationalist/republican urban working class communities and those in border areas of the North. As the human rights lawyer Gareth Pierce, … recently put it:
“Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture (hooding, extreme stress positions, mock executions), brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant: that the state was seen to be combating terrorism sufficed… We should keep all this in mind as we look at the experiences of our new suspect community.”
IHRC argued in the briefing linked in the thread above, that it was just a matter of time before this shrinking of political space would encompass those dissenters and political activists beyond the Muslim community that the government of the day and its allies wanted to silence. Sure enough a tranche of reports on the ‘extreme left’ ‘pro-Palestinians’ and ‘environmentalists’ ensued in July of the same year.
It is no surprise that the justification for today’s proscription is centred on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Groups and movements – whether Muslim, left, environmental or other -that have been targeted in ways similar to Hizb ut-Tahrir over the last several years should be under no illusions that this proscription is a government test to see how much further this latest assault on civil rights can go. As another group pointed out on Twitter / X today, we have been here before, and had tried in piecemeal fashion to campaign against the proscription of those groups waging a battle for liberation today in Palestine. The rerun of the demonisation that broke pro-Palestinian advocacy before needs to be learned from. Fast.
Today is yet another wake-up call. We really need to hear it. We need to shout about it. This government, such that is it and its successors need to know that the new world organising itself right now and rethinking the issues of power and powerlessness is not to be ignored.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK
* See this screenshot from the first page of a search in The Times on 16 January for the term ‘Hizb ut-Tahrir’
