A disgrace to our law and our liberty

FROM almost every viewpoint, the Home Office proposal to introduce compulsory electronic tagging of asylum seekers is offensive and objectionable.

To these concerns should be added the silence (thus far) across the Scottish Executive. While this is indeed a reserved matter and one which falls under the competence of the Home Office, this does not excuse an Executive silence while a major new practice is introduced into the Scottish legal system: the compulsory surveillance of people who have not been proven guilty of an offence.

Scotland (once again) has been chosen as one of the trial-run areas for government legislative experiment. According to Home Office sources, about 70 asylum seekers here, together with those in selected areas of England and Wales, will be recruited to the compulsory trials, due to start in September.

It is hard to imagine a proposal more likely to inflame an already sensitive situation. And the language of the Home Office yesterday ("this is something they (sic) will have to put up with if they want to come into our (sic) country") hardly suggests that of an agency much concerned with sensitivities, still less with human rights.

Rather, this is a desperate initiative bearing the imprimatur of a Home Secretary who, for political purposes, feels compelled to appear and to sound "tough on asylum seekers". That this posture is struck within the same government that says it respects Britain’s liberal record on asylum seekers and welcomes cultural diversity only adds to the sense that this proposal is as narrowly political as it is ill thought through.

The argument for compulsory electronic tagging is twofold. First, it is intended to make good the manifest deficiencies in the existing system of processing asylum seekers. The second is that it is cheaper than using detention centres and would mainly apply to "failed" asylum seekers. It would, say apologists, reduce the need for detention centres such as Dungavel.

On the first, it does no such thing. Indeed, it would surely be preferable - and less costly - to remedy the procedures that are supposed to be working and get the immigration service to do the job it is charged to do rather than introduce a system that may well be argued in the courts as one that confers de facto recognition of asylum seekers as citizens.

Tackling the procedural problem at source means more thorough vetting in the granting, for example, of work visas rather than obliging British embassy staff to hand out visas knowing them to be bogus. There are existing laws and procedures. And it is these that should be properly observed by the government. Were this done as the Home Office is obliged to do, the need for compulsory tagging would fall away.

As for the Executive, it should not hide behind the skirts of the Home Office in this matter. It has an obligation to defend a separate legal system and the duties and privileges that inhere in that system. To our law and liberty, this proposal is a disgrace. Someone in the Executive should have the courage to say so.