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UK: Terrorism is "non-political"

01 May 1996

The House of Lords decided in May that a refugee from Algeria could not claim the protection of the Geneva Convention because of his involvement in an attack on a civilian airport, in which ten people were killed, and in an attack on an army barracks, in which one person died. Both of these acts constituted "serious non-political crimes", they said, excluding the actor from international protection. The judgement sees the Lords rummaging through legal, political and philosophical history, trying on and discarding various criteria for the definition of "non-political" before lighting on a never-ratified 1937 League of Nations Convention on Terrorism. From it they take a definition of "acts of terrorism": "criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons, or a group of persons or the general public". Armed with this definition, they characterise the bombing of a civilian airport, fairly uncontroversially, as "terrorist" and so "non-political". The difficulty arises when they characterise an attack on a military barracks as "terrorist" and so "non-political"; we begin to see that the definition is so wide as to include any act of violence directed against a state, thus excluding from international protection anyone committing any such act. In the last century, the courts refused to apply the political exception to the extradition of an anarchist who had assassinated a politician in his own country. Despite the certainty that the man would be executed, the court held he could be returned, as the act was a non-political crime; anarchists wanted to get rid of all government and were therefore "anti-political". Perhaps in the next century this month's House of Lords decision will seem as absurd as that. T v Immigration Officer, 22.5.96.