Since coming into force in the early 2000s, rapid legal development has seen the body of permanent UK-wide anti-terrorism legislation expand in both size and reach. Central to this legislation and to facilitating pre-emption through intervention, prosecution, and detention is a collection of broadly drafted and vaguely-defined preventive criminal offences under the Terrorism Acts 2000 and 2006. Criminalizing Terrorism offers a much-needed appraisal of these offences through a rigorous critical analysis of the law and its enforcement, shedding light on where UK anti-terrorism law finds itself, how it got here, and why being here is a problem.
The book traces controversial anti-terrorism offences from their construction and statutory form through to patterns in implementation and enforcement. It serves as a comprehensive guide to these offences and the debates and concerns surrounding them. In bringing together archival, documentary, and doctrinal analysis alongside interviews with prosecutors and defence counsel, the book presents an empirically informed critique of the UK's approach to the pre-emptive criminalization of terrorism. From this analysis Criminalizing Terrorism argues that the legislation ought to, but presently fails to, recognize the rule of law, justice principles, and human rights as security claims in their own right, and as hard constraints on state power rather than as matters to be compromised on in the name of national security.
Providing a robust and detailed critical overview of anti-terrorism offences, this book contributes to and advances important conversations about counter-terrorism and harm, preventive criminalization, and the place of both discretion and risk in criminal law.
