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Control orders are – as their name suggests – orders which control people by subjecting them to restrictions on their daily lives. They are applied to persons suspected of involvement in terrorism or support for terrorism, who the security services say cannot be prosecuted.

After 9/11, foreign suspected terrorists who could not legally be deported because of the risk they would be tortured in their home countries were detained indefinitely in high security prisons.

In December 2004, the judicial committee of the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court) ruled indefinite detention unlawful, since it applied only to foreigners, and not to British terrorist suspects.

In March 2005 Control Orders were introduced, and are applied both to British terrorist suspects and to foreign suspects who cannot be deported.

A typical control order contains a 16-hour curfew (meaning that the controlled person must stay in his accommodation for 16 hours a day, eg from 6pm to 10am – and permission is needed even to go into the garden in curfew hours); an electronic tag, worn round the ankle, to allow monitors to track movements; an obligation to report to monitors before leaving the accommodation and on return; a geographical boundary beyond which movement is prohibited; advance vetting of all visitors; restrictions on meetings outside the home; no mobile phone, computer or telecomms equipment except for one land-line phone; restriction to one bank account. The orders are imposed for a year at a time, and some controlled persons have been controlled for five years.¹

A high court judge has to give permission before a control order is made, but the proposed controlled person is given no notice and no chance to challenge the order in advance. It generally takes over a year for the controlled person’s challenge to be heard in the courts, during which time all the restrictions are in force.

The controlled persons are generally given very little information about the reasons for the order. Frequently the allegation has been in very general terms, eg ‘It is assessed that you have been engaged in attack planning’, with no further details.

Until 2005 the government accepted that foreign terrorist suspects could not be returned to states such as Algeria, Jordan and Libya because of the serious risk of torture. But in that year, the government began to seek diplomatic assurances from these countries that they would accept national security deportees from the UK and not torture them, and after concluding agreements, began the process of returning deportees to these countries. The courts have ruled that Libya is not safe, and national security deportations to the other countries are suspended while applications to the European Court of Human Rights are pending. Meanwhile, the proposed deportees are detained in high security prison, often for years. If released, they are subjected to even more stringent conditions than Control Orders, with curfews of up to 22 hours a day, and in one case 24 hours a day.

1 For more on the impact of control orders and national security deportation see Victoria Brittain, ‘Besieged in Britain’, Race and Class (2009) 50:3. Institute of Race Relations