Category: Prevention of Terrorism Acts
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A forgotten ‘suspect community’? Remembering the experiences of the Irish in Britain in the 1970s-80s
Two events this week have brought back the conflict in Northern Ireland to the attention of many, nearly twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement – the death of Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness and the terrorist attack at Westminster. Firstly McGuinness’ death demonstrated that while many had accepted the outcomes of the peace process and…
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New article in Terrorism & Political Violence: ‘Creating the National/Border Security Nexus’
Terrorism and Political Violence have just published my article, ‘Creating the National/Border Security Nexus: Counter-Terrorist Operations and Monitoring Middle Eastern and North African to the UK in the 1970s-1980s’. It is based on research funded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ David Phillips Travelling Fellowship. The abstract is below: This article looks at an…
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Policing the Northern Irish border in the 1970s
With the debate about ‘Brexit’ heating up in the final week before the Referendum, there has been more and more debate about what would happen to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the British, Northern Irish and Irish authorities were also concerned about this border,…
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Removing the barriers to deportation from the UK: Lord Carrington and counter-terrorist efforts in the early 1980s
A story has appeared in The Guardian today that the UK Appeals Court has ruled that it is legal for foreign convicted criminals to be deported without their chance to appeal from the United Kingdom. The right to appeal before deportation was originally enshrined in the Immigrants Appeals Act 1969 and was long considered a…
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The Prevention of Terrorism Acts and exclusion orders: 40 years since their introduction
This week it will be forty years since the introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (Temporary Provisions) 1974, passed quickly in the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974. The POTA was a broad piece of counter-terrorism legislation and many of the controversial elements of contemporary legislation concerning counter-terrorism and national security…