Response to Request for Views on Implementation of Prevent from the London Assembly Police & Crime Committee
2nd May 2015
Our Mission: Promoting human rights and holding governments to account, drawing upon the lessons learned from the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Our Expertise and Achievements: Since 1990, Rights Watch (UK) (formerly British
Irish Rights Watch) has held the UK Government to account for human rights abuses in the context of counter terrorism operations both domestically and abroad. We work with victims and communities to expose human rights abuses, to obtain redress and to hold those responsible for such abuses to account. Our interventions have reflected our range of expertise, from the right to a fair trial to the scope of the governments investigative obligation under Article 2 of the European Convention in Human Rights. We have a long record of working closely with NGOs and government authorities to share that expertise. And we have received wide recognition, as the first winner of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europes Human Rights Prize in 2009 alongside other honours.
How well you believe Prevent is being delivered locally by the Met Police, MOPAC, and other organisations involved in tackling extremism in London?
In our experience, individuals, community groups and other NGOs with whom we have spoken to about the Prevent programme have been generally negative. In general the sentiment has been that the programme is discriminatory, increases community tensions, and is widely discredited within the community. The overriding perception is that Government and the police are seeking to work against, rather than with, the community, and are unwilling to engage with the communities concerns. We believe that a key lesson from the conflict in Northern Ireland is that Government must seek to work with communities, and build cohesion, otherwise risk increasing factors that put individuals at greater risk of engaging with terrorist activity. We expand on the relevant lessons from the Northern Irish conflict in our answer to the third question below.
We would also like to draw the Police and Crime Committees attention to the following information which we believe will be of some use in answering this question:
https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/news/thoughtleadership/?itemno=23932
http://mabonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Claystone-rethinking-radicalisation.pdf
http://www.schedule7.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/hillyard_essay_2005.pdf
What impact the new Prevent duty will have for the Met Police