WHAT 'PREVENT' PREVENTS?
Terrorism or human rights?
An investigation into the de-radicalisation scheme of the UK government.
Prevent is designed to stop vulnerable people from being drawn into extremism. However, it has received huge criticism from the UN, international rights groups, and community organisations for profiling communities, and violating fundamental rights. We investigate the truth behind these allegations.
“On a fine day in 2019, I got a phone call from a stranger who introduced herself as a safeguarding officer. She asked me about my private and personal life. When that phone call ended, if I can be honest, the nightmare began in my life,” Naila, a 27-year-old public servant in the UK told Westminster World.
Naila, a converted Muslim British citizen, lives in the South of England. When she received this phone call, it has been four years since she had converted to Islam. She was married to another converted fellow British citizen.
“When did you become a Muslim? How did you meet your husband? The Prevent officer from the other end asked me,” Naila recalled.
Prevent is one of the four components of CONTEST, the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy. Protect, Prepare, and Pursue are the other three components of the strategy. Although the Prevent strategy was published in 2011, it was not incorporated into the Security and Counter-Terrorism Act until 2015. Since then, specified authorities like teachers and health workers are obliged to report anyone who deemed suspicious to them to Prevent scheme so that these vulnerable people can be stopped from being drawn into terrorism.
In Naila's case, it was her own family who referred her to the police under the scheme, as they were concerned over the man she fell for. It was later forwarded to Prevent, the counter-radicalisation strategy of the UK government. She got to know about her referral only when she had received a call for the first time from the officer. Naila and her husband were later interrogated by the Prevent officers.
The crime
What was their crime to be interrogated under the counter-radicalisation scheme of the government?
“I have embraced Islam and married another converted Muslim. I wanted Nikah1 in a Halal2 way,” said Naila.
They met each other on a very popular social media platform. Although meeting partners online was quite common in the UK, Naila’s case was quite different and it turned into a “nightmare” for her.
The government claims that Prevent has been designed to safeguard vulnerable people from being drawn into terrorism and it operates in the pre-crime stage.
“At first the officer didn’t necessarily identify herself as a Prevent worker. I also did not know then what exactly Prevent was.
“The Prevent officers were concerned that I was vulnerable to be manipulated into, in their terms, an extreme environment. However, there was nothing about me nor my husband to show that we were vulnerable to extremism. I did find it extremely prejudiced and Islamophobic,” Naila said.
Even though Naila and her husband were English and British persons, their British values were specifically called into question during the interrogation. She explained the line of questioning was mainly around their decision to practice the Islamic faith and to marry another Muslim fellow.
“The irony is that Britain is a very diverse place.
“They were questioning my Islamic values. None of those values, particularly what they were asking about, contradict anything that happens day in and day out in Britain.
“Before my conversion to Islam, would somebody ever question my British values? Or would they accept me as a British-born and brought-up girl?” Naila questioned.
In 2017-18, a year before Naila received the phone call, 7318 Prevent referrals were made. 42% of cases among those were judged to require no action. Another 40% were judged not to be at the risk of radicalisation and subsequently directing them to other services. Only 18% of the cases were discussed at Channel, the second last stage before the final Channel programming. Only 5% referred to programming.
WHAT 'PREVENT' PREVENTS? TERRORISM OR HUMAN RIGHTS? - An investigative documentary trailer
WHAT 'PREVENT' PREVENTS? TERRORISM OR HUMAN RIGHTS? - An investigative documentary trailer
Naila’s case did not stop with the initial referral under Prevent. It has escalated to Channel, a top-level programme under Prevent scheme. Channel is a multi-agency safeguarding process and a voluntary programme that is claimed to protect people identified as vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism.
“I am still devastated that I was put in that bracket of extremism. Because there is nothing about me as extreme.”
It has had a jeopardising impact on her personal and professional life as well. She is now in “limbo.” Because her personal data is being kept with the Home Office as a suspected person referred under Prevent, she would never be able to get certain jobs.
Without doing any crime, her data that is kept with the Home Office “can be accessed by certain agencies very easily. It will pop up in a background check, the likelihood is that I won’t get those jobs. I am scared for my future.”
“Personally, I lost trust in people around me. I am also concerned about the people who are with me. It got to a point where I felt that I am risking the lives of the people near me who are Muslim, even though I haven’t done anything. Will they be accused of things because they are associated with me, especially when this was going on? It was a really horrible time.” Naila shared her anxieties and worries.
“Although they admitted there is nothing to investigate, I am yet to receive official communication in writing. I have legally made a claim for that. The fight is still on,”
“I did notice why I am targeted like this. Because I fit into certain demographics where they are deemed to be vulnerable. Millions of people may fit into this category. Being a Muslim and referred by my family was more than enough to fall into it,” Naila said.
Flaws in other counter-terrorism policing laws
During this investigation, it has also come to light that other elements of counter-terrorism policing have been used earlier to fabricate evidence against ethnic minorities for racial profiling.
In the spring of 2008, Dr. Rizwan Sabir, then a Muslim postgraduate student at the University of Nottingham was arrested and held in solitary confinement for seven days by the West Midlands Police under the Terrorism Act and accused of downloading Al-Qaida terrorist manual for terrorist purposes from a US government website. This document is a publicly available one that can be purchased online or offline from Amazon or WH Smith.
He was released without any charge or apology. It was later found in an internal investigation into West Midlands police professional standards that the officers manipulated testimonies and fabricated arrest notes to accuse Rizwan Sabir of terrorist activity.
Although the police were found guilty of making up evidence, the standard board clarified that no officers will be investigated for misconduct.
In an exclusive interview allowed to Westminster World, Dr. Rizwan Sabir, now a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Justice Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, said: “This approach normalises racial profiling and fabricating cases against minorities.”
“My experience taught me a lot about the criminal justice system. You did not have to do much wrong in order to fall foul of the UK’s counter-terrorism laws that have been created in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The law under which I was falsely prosecuted makes it a criminal offence to be in possession of a piece of information used for terrorists. It doesn’t require information to be used by the person for terrorist purposes. It is the nature of the information that is criminal to possess.
“You could be an academic, a student, a journalist, a librarian, or a lawyer enough to be prosecuted just because you are in possession of this nature of the information that is used for terrorists. The law (section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000) is very broad which allows the state to investigate and prosecute people based on very little or no evidence that they intend to commit an act of terror.” Rizwan said.
Section 58(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000 criminalises the collection, possession, or viewing online of any information that is likely to be useful for a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. It is punishable by up to 15 years.
According to the official independent review report of the act published in 2020, statistics show that section 58 was the most charged principal offence in 2019 and 2020, and the second most charged principal offence in the years 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2018.
“This document I downloaded had been used the world over for academic research by researchers, journalists, and students. Yet, these students and people were not racialised or do not find themselves being investigated and treated with this degree of suspicion. Yes, the Muslim brown finds himself at the receiving end of the counter-terrorism infrastructure. So, we can see how the racist logic goes to the core of the contemporary practice of counter-terrorism policing.”
In another word, according to Dr. Rizwan Sabir, possession of this document by a middle-class white academic at the University of Oxford, for example, will probably not drive the police’s curiosity and interest in the same way that this document in possession of a Muslim Pakistani or a Muslim Algerian male will play in the profiling of those people.
It clearly shows that some sections of the Terrorism Act as well as its implementation have already resulted in racial profiling of ethnic minorities, particularly the Muslims in the UK. It is on top of that the UK government has strengthened Prevent, the counter-radicalisation scheme, by imparting it into the Security, and Counter-Terrorism Act 2015.
Prevent, a controversial scheme?
There are pro and counter-arguments with regard to Prevent. On the one hand, it is the most controversial scheme that has been widely criticised by UN bodies, human rights organisations, and Muslim communities for its endangering impact on ethnic minorities. On the other hand, it is supported by right-wing think tanks and politicians.
David Cameron, the former UK prime minister has recently defended Prevent claiming that criticising Prevent is “in essence enabling terrorism.” His comment came out against recent studies and reports that alleged Prevent has a dangerous racist approach against children and ethnic minorities in the UK.
A similar defence has been made by Policy Exchange, an alleged right-wing policy think tank in a report they published on 22 April 2022. It sees the criticism against Prevent as ‘delegitimising counter-terrorism’ and as an Islamist and leftist conspiracy.
“The Prevent counter-terrorism strategy is perhaps the most controversial government policy, most people have never heard of. Public recognition of it is generally low, but opposition from Britain’s raucous Islamist scene is near-total. From there, the opposition has spread to sections of the far-left, and those parts of academia where Islamism and the revolutionary left intersect.” A report by the Policy Exchange titled ‘Delegitimising Counter-Terrorism’ claimed.
The government and the conservative think tanks like Policy Exchange have rejected all the criticisms and concerns raised against Prevent.
The vital question here is, was the criticism really enabling terrorism or improving counter-terrorism?
Rejecting the claims of the campaigners in favour of this particular counter-terrorism scheme Dr. Layla Aitlhadj, Director of Prevent Watch, an independent organisation that tracks Prevent cases in the UK, argued: “Prevent is counter-productive in every sense. The very idea of Prevent itself is absurd.”
Dr. Layla Aitlhadj has published extensively on Prevent and the broader implications of counter-terrorism legislation across multiple platforms including community, professional and independent outlets. Internationally, she has also contributed to and co-ordinated submissions to the International Court of Justice, and the European Security Conference on the human rights violations inherent in counter-extremism policies and programmes.
On being asked about David Cameron's defence of Prevent, Layla replied: “This is a serious allegation. There need to be an official investigation if it is really enabling terrorism.”
Under her directorship, Prevent Watch has come up with a report on People’s Review of Prevent (PROP). It was co-authored by John Holmwood. He is Professor Emeritus in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.
He was formerly the Chair of the Council of UK Heads and Professors of Sociology (2007–2012), and President of the British Sociological Association (2012–2014) John is also the editor (with Alex Smith) of Sociologies of Moderation: Problems of Democracy, Expertise and Media (Sociological Review Monographs, 2013). He also co-authored with Theresa O’Toole the book Countering Extremism in British Schools? The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair (Policy Press, 2018).
An Interview with Dr. Rizwan Sabir by PP Jaseem
An Interview with Dr. Rizwan Sabir by PP Jaseem
What are the criticisms against Prevent? Why?
Countering terrorism would be an utmost important matter of concern for any government in the world so that they can fulfil their promise of a safe and secure society and nation. The UK government also considers it quite important. Although Prevent is one such strategy of the UK government, it has invited a lot of criticism. At the same time, it is important to note that other counter-terrorism strategies have not invited similar criticisms.
Prevent as a counter-terrorism strategy tries to prevent vulnerable people from being drawn into extremism or terrorism. As explained earlier, Prevent deals with the pre-crime stage. It means that Prevent does not deal with any offence being committed. In such a scenario, this counter-terrorism scheme deals with assumptions or suspicions that an offence may be committed in the future. So, how does one identify this vulnerable person who may commit an act of terror in the future to ‘prevent’ him/her from committing it well in advance?
One needs to use his or her subjective understanding to identify those vulnerable individuals. Subjective understanding can be anything that we call intuition, or guess. What would be those intuitions? Why it would not be one’s prejudices? It doesn’t need any objective analysis. Here comes the first and foremost criticism against Prevent.
The very design of Prevent itself gives a free hand to racial prejudices in identifying the terror threats in its early stages.
According to Layla, one’s subjective understanding would always be determined by several social factors. “Media and statist propaganda will always play a major role in influencing one’s understanding.
Dr. Layla Aitlhadj (Image: People’s Review of Prevent)
Dr. Layla Aitlhadj (Image: People’s Review of Prevent)
The chart shows Muslim children who are referred under Prevent and proceeded to the Channel, 2017-18
The chart shows Muslim children who are referred under Prevent and proceeded to the Channel, 2017-18
“A person who keeps on hearing Islamophobic rhetoric like the comment of Boris Johnson, the outgoing Prime Minister of the UK, that Muslim women look like ‘letter boxes’ would use his/her prejudices to identify whom he/she thinks as vulnerable under Prevent.”
On top of that, “there were occasions that public servants have officially been asked to use their gut to identify the vulnerable people,” Layla added in an interview with Westminster World.
“This is more in the training and we have come across such a case in the PROP where we mention the teacher who made the referral of a young boy said they don't have to check the accuracy of the referral.
“Jenny3 is a head teacher of a primary school associated with the referral of a nursery-aged child. When a complaint from the child’s mother came into the school, Jenny responded that the Prevent duty does not require teachers to use their own judgement about the consequences of the referrals, nor does it allow them to use their own professional judgement to investigate if a statement or comment of a child is true,” Layla said.
As an expert in the criminal and justice system in the UK, Dr. Rizwan Sabir who is also an author of the book titled ‘The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State’ accused the government of creating a series of racially motivated indicators to find out the vulnerable individuals under Prevent. The Westminster World could not independently verify that the government has published certain indicators.
“The government has created a series of indicators in order to work out what factors might suggest that somebody is going to be a terrorist in the future. It includes, for example, altruistic tendencies or making grow their beards changing the way of their parents, or wearing the headscarf. All of these factors are considered to be signs that somebody may go on to become a terrorist in the future.
“As a result of these legal and normal indicators to identify a future terrorist, an ordinary individual is being constructed as a suspect. It legitimises the approach of the government, the police, and the security agencies in targeting an individual early on.”
As it operates in the pre-crime stage, according to Dr. Rizwan Sabir, targeting an individual under Prevent is based upon the idea that this person is riskier.
“How do we identify this risk? It is profiling. It is their race. It is their religion. And the way they express their politics.”
The UN Special Rapporteur has also attacked the UK government for rolling out Prevent counter-extremism strategy without a clear definition of extremism. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association wrote in June 2017: “One of the biggest concerns brought to the Special Rapporteur’s attention during his mission was the Government’s focus on countering non-violent extremism without a narrow and explicit definition, at the expense of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms.” (Paragraph 6)
The UN special rapporteur also endorsed the criticisms against Prevent and slapped the UK government for its authoritarian attempts.
“The Special Rapporteur concurs with civil society that the Prevent strategy is inherently flawed… unclear guidelines give excessive discretion to decision-makers, which subsequently makes the overall application of Prevent unpredictable and potentially arbitrary, hence rendering it inconsistent with the principle of the rule of law.” (Paragraph 10).
Prevent, and racial profiling
So, does racial prejudice play a part in Prevent, as many allege?’
One among them was the case of another Muslim revert in the UK. 25 years old Maira,4 has had to endure racial abuse under Prevent over her choice of the veil. Her psychiatric treatment turned into an interrogation.
She has been diagnosed with ‘emotionally unstable personality disorder’. In the beginning, she had a good relationship with her psychiatrist. When Maira converted to Islam she discussed her religious beliefs with her psychiatrist. Initially, she has been referred to an NHS imam. There was nothing wrong with her in the result of his assessment.
After two years of her diagnosis. she was allocated to a new psychiatrist and she started to attend group therapy. As she started wearing the face veil during these sessions, the psychiatrist questioned her decision. She was later asked to meet the head psychiatrist. She went to meet the head reckoning that this was something related to her medication review. But the meeting became an interrogation. The line of questioning was about Syria, radicalisation, and her learnings of Islam. None of them was related to her ailment. Maria shared her experience with People’s Review of Prevent.
A normative practice of the Islamic faith is being called into question here under the counter-terrorism scheme.
Children on the target
According to PROP, Prevent has been applied disproportionately to children and young people and in a discriminatory fashion to Muslim children. In 2017-18, 27% of the total referrals were related to children under 15. Only 5.6% of those referred proceeded to Channel. 29% of referrals were of young people aged 15-20. Only 7% of those referrals proceeded on to Channel. In nutshell, around a third of all referrals made to Channel come from schools.
The chart shows Muslim children who are referred under Prevent and proceeded to the Channel, 2017-18
The chart shows Muslim children who are referred under Prevent and proceeded to the Channel, 2017-18
“More than 50% of the cases referred under Prevent each year are children who have neither committed nor intended to commit criminal offences (and in many cases are below the age of criminal responsibility).”
“The age varies from four to 11 years old. The Guardian once reported about the Prevent referral of a four-year-old Muslim child over his comment on Fortnite, a video game. It also reported that “more than 600 children under six were flagged under the Prevent scheme,” read the PROP report.
Salah5 is a 4-year-old Muslim boy in his early years of education. In 2019, he mentioned Fortnite, a video game. He also told that his father had “guns and bombs in his shed” referring to Fortnite. This was referred to the police following Prevent procedure.
Police raided the home of the child that night. His mother later shared her experience with PROP. She felt that if her child was not a Muslim then he would not have been viewed in this scrutinized manner.
Astonishingly, Salah was referred under Prevent even after he had clearly mentioned Fortnite. The transcript of his conversation shared with his mother by the school was proving it.
It shows that Prevent not only discriminatorily targets ethnic minorities but also pathologizes their normative practices and behavior.
But the government denied discrimination, as his case has been dropped considering that this is not a fit case to be forwarded to Channel. However, the case has been referred under Prevent.
“A referral is already someway into the Prevent process when harms will have been done to children and young people as a consequence of being under suspicion,” read the PROP report.
It was two years before a similar incident was reported.
In 2016, the parents of a nursery-going Muslim child in the UK were threatened to refer their 4-year-old boy to the counter-extremism scheme after he drew a picture, that the nursery staff thought, showed his father making a “cooker-bomb”, The Guardian reported.
The child was actually drawing, according to the child’s mother, his father cutting a cucumber with a knife. The Staff misheard the explanation of the child and thought he spelled “cooker-bomb”.
In a video, the mother shared with The Guardian, the child spelled “cuker-bum” when he was asked to spell cucumber by showing a piece of it. It seems a far-fetched claim that the child drew an image of his father making a “cooker-bomb” by connecting both the picture and his explanation.
The family based-in Luton had been left shaken and upset after this incident. The mother shot this video to share with the nursery staff to prove that they have wrongly understood her child.
Surprisingly, while explaining this, the mother had an uncanny conversation with another nursery staff. When she asked the staff “Do I look like a terrorist when do you look at me? The staff replied: ‘does Jimmy Savile, seem a paedophile?
The family claimed that all referrals of 19 children reported in Luton in 2016 are under the cloud of suspicion.
PROP report included the referral of another boy under Prevent for reading the Mein Kamph.
Noel is a 15-year-old secondary school child who was referred under Prevent for merely reading Mein Kampf, an autobiographical manifesto by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. He was interested in history and politics.
But his history teacher was asked about his motivation for reading Mein Kampf, once the school found out he was reading it. Although his history teacher reported that Noel has no particular impression or interest in Mein Kampf. She also reported that different conversations about controversial topics were quite normal. However, the school still suggested that it may be an appropriate case for a Prevent referral.
The school then reached out to the Prevent lead to get advice on the threshold for referrals which subsequently led to an official Prevent referral.
Noel’s parents shared their interaction when Prevent tried to get involved.
“They were very persistent; I eventually agreed to Noel having a Channel mentor but I found the experience to be completely unrelated to how it was pitched with regards to Noel’s supposed vulnerabilities.”
“So, I told them that he would be exiting the programme and we stopped the sessions,” PROP reported.
Abuse of rights
The Prevent referrals, also suggest that Prevent is an abuse of the right to privacy of the people, and the protection of their data.
A case we examined was of an 11-year-old secondary school Muslim boy with special educational needs. According to the report of PROP, his mother noticed that he was deeply unhappy at his school. She had tried hard to move him into a new school as she felt that his current school ethos or environment was not conducive to his wellbeing. On an occasion, another child alleged that during a fire drill, he had overheard the child saying that he wished the school would ‘burn down.’
As a result, the child was referred to Prevent. Although the Prevent officer who investigated it did not take it any further after speaking to the mother of the child and realizing the context, the mother was shocked by the school’s decision to make the referral in the first place, without even informing her.
“Being a brown, Muslim Asian boy does not make you a terrorist.” The referral not only led to a breakdown in trust between the child and the school but also resulted in his data being stored on police databases despite being dropped by Prevent officers
Another shocking aspect of this or any other official referral was the breach of data protection law.
The mother was able to successfully get the data deleted. However, it took a year for her between suspecting that his data had been stored on police databases to securing its removal. When the police agreed to delete the data, she said: “I am so overjoyed, I could cry! A year and 3 months on but still so, so pleased.”
Prevent allows storage of data of suspected individuals in police records. Shockingly, this incident shows that the data of children who are wrongly referred under Prevent will also be included in these records. It is kept with other records of serious crimes including theft, rape, and murder.
In yet another incident, Prevent and social service had involved in a Muslim mother’s life when she exercised her statutory right to withdraw her child from the religious activities of schools. Although the Education Act 1996 enshrined a provision that gives parents a right to request to wholly or partly withdraw their children from any religious activities of schools, she was painted by the school staff of her child as ‘extreme’ and contrary to ‘British Values.’
Prevent has been used in this instance as a way to encroach into the private affairs of a mother, breaching her right to privacy.
Although comparatively lesser, the impact of Prevent is not limited to school-going students or their parents but also has a negative impact on University-going Muslim students.
National Union of Students in its survey on documenting the experience of Muslim students in 2017-18 reported that “We consistently found that Prevent which forms part of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy and requires educational institutions to identify and report students whom they deem to be ‘vulnerable to radicalisation significantly affects the engagement opportunities for Muslim students.”
There is another piece of evidence that has been revealed in reply to a Freedom of Information request that supports the claim that Prevent disproportionately targets ethnic minorities. The UK Home Office replied to an FoI request that there are 44 Prevent Priority Areas in England and Wales. However, it did not answer the question what are the criteria by which these areas are identified?
Prevent’s major implementation takes place in these selected priority areas in the UK.
These are areas of special concern with extra funding allocation.
According to the 2011 census, 73% of the Muslim population in England and Wales are living in these 44 Prevent Priority Areas. The data suggests that Muslims are majorly targeted by this counter-terrorism scheme. Unlike other local authorities, PPAs (Prevent Priority Areas) receive special funds to execute the Prevent strategy. At the same time, Home Office cited ‘national security’ reason to refuse to answer the question about the determining factors of PPAs.
Counter arguments and their rebuttals
There are two major counterarguments against these criticisms. One of them rejected the allegation that Prevent targets ethnic minorities. This defence claimed that Prevent is ideologically neutral and far-right extremism was also equally referred to under Prevent.
Based on the data of the last couple of years, the government claims that Prevent tries to address all extremist tendencies equally. Unlike earlier, the far-right extremism referred to under Prevent has outnumbered Islamic extremism in the last couple of years. The fundamental defence here is: If it was mostly targeting Muslims and other ethnic minorities, then how does it outnumber the Islamist extremism in the first place?
According to the official data of the government, in 2018-19 the right-wing extremist cases referred to the Channel under Prevent were 45% while Islamist radicalization was 37%. This trend continued in the subsequent years as well. In 2019-20 right-wing cases were 43% while cases registered under the category of Islamist extremism were 30%. In the last year, Islamist radicalisation cases were 22% while right-wing cases were 46%.
A table that shows Prevent referrals based on ideologies (Image: PP Jaseem)
A table that shows Prevent referrals based on ideologies (Image: PP Jaseem)
But rebutting this claim, Dr. Layla raised yet another counterargument in an interview with Westminster World that “Muslims are still being targeted out of proportion.”
“Muslims constitute only 5% of the UK population. They disguise the public with the manipulated presentation of the data. Apart from that, it is not right to target anyone with a flawed system,” Layla added.
However, it is also interesting, to note how this increase in far-right referrals was being viewed by the government-appointed reviewer.
It has to be read along with the leaked papers from the report of the government’s proposed independent review of Prevent by Sir William Shawcross. The leaked papers contained a provocative recommendation to have more focus on Muslims rather than on right-wing extremism claiming to “meet the threshold of terrorism.”
This recommendation in the leaked paper has the potential to irk uproar. The timing of this leakage by The Guardian in an exclusive report has further stirred criticism against Prevent. It came days after the Buffalo mass shooting, a racially motivated attack by a white supremacist in which he killed 13 persons. The killer had a self-confession that it was a racially motivated attack. Most of the victims were blacks.
When the world witnessed a large scale of white supremacist racist violence, the Shawcross review report blamed Prevent for having a “double standard” approach and unwarranted focus on far-right extremism. It has also criticised for having a narrow focus on Islamist extremism. On the contrary, Prevent has always been criticised for the racial profiling of Muslims.
According to The Guardian report, the leaked excerpts from the Shawcross review report have put forward three major claims.
1. A renewed focus on Islamist extremism, even though the individuals do not yet meet the threshold of terrorism.
2. Individuals have been referred to Prevent, the government’s anti-extremism programme, to access mental health support even when there is no evidence of extremism.
3. Some Prevent-funded groups have promoted extremist narratives including support for the Taliban.
The appointment of William Shawcross as the independent reviewer of Prevent has already been widely criticised for his alleged Islamophobic comments and prejudices. Shawcross, former head of the charity watchdog, made a controversial remark in 2012 as the head of the Henry Jackson Society, a neo-conservative think tank about Islam. He said: “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations.”
Many human rights organizations like Amnesty International UK, Muslim organizations, and communities boycotted the independent review of the strategy in the wake of his appointment. It has finally led to the People’s Review of Prevent which argued that the scheme is flawed and counter-productive.
Another blanket defence was that it is productive and will help stop future acts of terrorism and make the world a secure place, even if there are flaws it has to be rectified.
“Whatever the outcome and reaction to the forthcoming Independent Review of Prevent by William Shawcross, counter-terrorism and counterextremism strategies of some kind will still be needed, and it is almost certain that such strategies, however articulated, will continue to be attacked by Islamist and other activist groups. This is because it is likely – and entirely appropriate – that counter-terrorism and counter-extremism efforts will continue to seek to address the contributory factors of terrorism and extremism upstream in ideology, beliefs and values,” read the report of the Policy Exchange ‘Deligimising Counter-Terrorism.’
“If it is productive, then why terrorist offences have again happened in the UK. Interestingly, in some of those cases, the accused were earlier monitored under Prevent. Even after they were referred under Prevent, the law-enforcement agencies could not stop their terror acts. It indicates that Prevent is not actually preventing anything,” Layla rebutted.
Numerous incidents could be quoted to establish this fact.
“Usman Khan, the culprit in the Fishmongers’ Hall attack was released from prison following his sentence and monitored under Prevent,” claims the PROP report.
The Manchester Arena bombing is worth examining here. Following the bombing, Didsbury Mosque, where the culprit Salman Abedi used to attend to perform religious rituals, was accused of failing to report him under Prevent. However, Detective Chief Inspector Dominic Scully has gathered evidence as part of the Inquiry that suggested Abedi was already known to Counter-Terrorism Police and other security services as a potential ‘subject of interest’ who have connections with other ‘subjects of interest’ under Pursue, another strand of Contest, the counter-terrorism scheme of the UK government. According to the evidence, MI5 also passed the intelligence inputs about Abedi to the police but they didn’t act on it under Pursue.
It shows that the government has failed to utilise the existing strand of the counter-terrorism strategy of the government to battle the real threats. Instead, it was used for batting for the implementation of Prevent, a pre-crime stage radicalisation strategy. In fact, Prevent has little to do with this case.
Similarly, In the killing of Sir David Amess, the Southend MP, the accused Ali Harbi Ali, was referred under Prevent earlier, according to The Telegraph report
On the allegation that those, who criticise Prevent, are undermining the government’s effort to counter terrorism and have Islamist (as a political ideology) interests and links.
“We are not against counter-terrorism strategy as such. We are only against Prevent which is counter-productive. All that we are trying to say is that Prevent does not prevent terrorism. Instead, it normalizes Islamophobia and legalises public expression of racial bias and prejudices,” Layla replied.
Summing up the impact of Prevent, Dr. Rizwan Sabir, senior lecturer in Criminology in the School of Justice Studies at Liverpool John Moores University also argued that Prevent is counterproductive.
“The idea of Prevent which is about stopping people from engaging in violence in the future sounds like a good idea. But Prevent is actually counter-productive. Because the policy is structured and engineered not to deal with the actual drivers of political conflicts. But it is rather to address the symptoms of a particular problem,” Sabir said.
This idea of Prevent similar to crime prevention, he argued, “is the philosophy and practice.”
“In order to address a conflict, one needs to understand what drives it. That helps to come up with a solution. However, Prevent is not crime prevention as it is not finding solutions to warfare, civil war, and political instability the world over. What it is interested is in dealing with violent behavior, not with the drivers of the violent behavior. In fact, all it would do is make the entire Muslim community a suspect community.”
An independent report prepared in July 2019 for the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism has also endorsed the criticisms against Prevent: “An extensive existing research, including that undertaken by civil society organisations, suggests that there is some distrust or uncertainty about the regulatory frameworks, motivating logics, reporting, transparency, and rights respectfulness of countering extremism generally, and Prevent in particular … that (i) counter-extremism activities result in violations of legally protected human rights, including rights to privacy, education, assembly, expression, and non-discrimination; (ii) counter-extremism activities are ineffective and have unintended societal impacts with negative effects for long-term and sustainable security; and (iii) there is a lack of political willingness to meaningfully review and revisit the current approach to countering extremism, and thus address their potentially deleterious rights, society, and security impacts.”
The Prevent scheme violates many existing laws including The Human Rights Act (1998), the Equalities Act (2010) Data Protection Act (2018).
The cases and data, Westminster World has either found or examined, suggest that Prevent is discriminatory, and used for racial profiling. It pathologised children and young adults, abused the right to privacy, and protection of personal data, and undermined the free expression.
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