Criminal justice system should be used for countering terrorism

The system of criminal justice ensures that guilty people are punished while the innocent go free. The society can be reliant on the system of criminal justice because it has several important characteristics, namely checks and balances that ensure that the courts of law reach the best decision. These checks and balances include independent and impartial courts which ensure that the rule of law is respected. The criminal justice system ensures access to legal defense. It ensures that you have access to evidence and witnesses. It makes certain types of evidence inadmissible in courts of law (for instance, the one obtained from torture). Most fundamentally, it embraces the principle that you are innocent unless proven guilty. Anti-terrorism legislation violates these principles. Civilians are often tried in military courts; the burden of proof is reversed (detainees have to prove that they are not guilty), they are denied access to witnesses and evidence, have poor legal defense, if any. Once we allow this, abuse takes place as innocent people can be convicted of anything rather easily. For instance, your neighbor works in the secret service. He is not a nice guy and does not like you, because once you slept with his wife. Being a smart and ingenious guy, he intercepts your conversations. Since in one of the conversations you explicitly denounce the government of your own country and say that it is no wonder that terrorists attack it, it is enough for him to tell to his friends in the secret service that you are a dangerous guy. Afterwards, you are detained in prison with no charges against you for two months. Although our example is completely fictional, it can happen easily. We see absurd situations around us – we’ve given quite a lot of examples of them already, for instance, our story of 16-year-old boy fetched from home and detained for months fits well enough to illustrate the point. It is most certainly not true that ordinary criminal justice system does not have the preventive capacity and would not help to prevent terrorist attacks. On the contrary, the system of criminal justice has a long record of successful investigations and prevention of terrorism. A comprehensive study finds out that in the US since late 1980's there were 135 terrorist prosecutions. It confirms that "that the federal courts have a proven track record of serving as an effective and credible system for prosecuting and incapacitating terrorists"[[http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/prosecute/]]. Scholars conclude that the greatest danger of terrorism is overreaction of democracies [[Kent Roach, The Criminal Law and Terrorism]]. In a detailed study of human rights and terrorism, it is found that anti-terrorism legislation pose a serious threat to human rights and democracies, as confirmed by witnesses from various countries: "(In Argentina) Legislation risked replicating the serious human rights violations of the past and that the existing criminal law was sufficient to address new terrorist threats. In Kenya too, the Panel was told that counter-terrorist laws, supported by western governments, may reverse important safeguards. In Northern Ireland, concerns were expressed that new UK-wide anti-terrorism legislation might hurt the process of political normalization underway"[[Assessing Damage, Urging Action. Report of the Eminent Jurists Panel on Terrorism, Counter-terrorism and Human Rights. p. 28]]. The same panel of jurists conclude that countries should rely on their criminal justice systems for countering terrorism. The virtue of the criminal justice system is that it does not rely on completely discretionary power of enforcement agencies. It is subject to the checks and balances which are so fundamental in ensuring justice. It is false that if we abolish anti-terrorism legislation, suddenly we will no longer be able to have any preventive measures. Now intelligence agencies are able to intercept any conversation at their own discretion, whenever they want to. If we abolish the legislation, they will have to get approval of a judge for their interceptions. The judge in this case acts as an independent party which ensures that investigators do not abuse their powers. Hence, the criminal justice system is capable of a) countering terrorism, b) ensuring justice. It can be claimed falsely that criminal justice system is “not flexible enough for these circumstances”. We strongly reject accusations like this. It is not flexible enough, because it is *not supposed* to be flexible in the first place. It is not supposed to allow unlimited detention without any charges. It is not supposed to place the burden of proof on the detainee. It is not supposed to allow military courts in civil cases. It is supposed to have appropriate checks and balances which ensure that enforcement agencies do not abuse their power (which they apparently do with anti-terrorism legislation as is proven in many of our examples). They have checks and balances, because we as a society are opposed to concentration of power, we want a balance which ensures that our freedoms and justice are preserved. If security would be our ultimate goal, we would convict every person when there is is even low probability that he actually was guilty and we would apply the strongest measures. Also, we would do this not only with terrorists, but also with ordinary crime. But this is not how we want our society to function. We also want people who are convicted of terrorism but are innocent to be able to prove their innocence. The standards applicable to ordinary crime and terrorism should be in line. Ordinary crime causes more deaths than terrorism and is more frequent. There is no fundamental difference why terrorism should be treated separately from other crime, especially taking into account the vagueness of what terrorism is (as was developed in our previous point). It is easier for the governments to psychologically position and justify terrorism as it is something which creates fear, but by no means it justifies extraordinary measures taken to prevent it, especially assuming it takes away from us so many of our liberties, abuses us and convicts innocent people.