Talk: ‘Preemptive prosecution behind 70% terror convictions in US’

Rights activists call for fair trials of terror suspects

ISLAMABAD: Two US lawyers and rights advocates have said that over 70 per cent terrorism convictions in United States since the 9/11 have been entrapped through ‘preemptive prosecution’.

Preemptive prosecution is going after individuals who have committed no crime but are alleged to possess an ideology that might dispose them to commit acts of terrorism.

Stephen Downs and Kathy E Manley spoke about their research titled “Inventing Terrorists” at a session at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) Islamabad on Thursday.

They said many terrorism cases in the US were proceeded under the garb of ‘National Security Crisis’ where the classified reports, which weren’t even revealed to the defense prosecutors already having security clearance, served as the basis for the conviction.

The study reveals that out of the 399 such convictions since the 9/11 incident, majority of which were Muslims, about 74 per cent were the result of sting operations against the people they assumed suspicious, and the cases were later handled in an unfair manner by using inconclusive evidences for the pre-intended jurisdictions.

The speakers laid the blame of such unjust prosecutions on the “one per cent doctrine”, according to which a person having only one per cent chance for carrying out a terrorist activity, qualifies to be dealt under the preemptive prosecution while terming it a “due process”. In reality, the speakers confessed, there were more probability for someone to be shot by a policeman than to be killed by a terrorist in America.

IPS director general Khalid Rahman called for more collaboration between human rights activists and groups around the world for raising voices against injustices in the name of national security, which in fact are making humanity more and more insecure.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 10^th, 2015.