LONDON — Britain’s House of Lords rejected a controversial plan to extend the amount of time police can hold terrorism suspects without charge from 28 to 42 days, and the government said it would abandon the proposal.
The 309-118 vote came after an impassioned debate Monday, dealing the government a significant defeat. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said hours after the vote that the government would drop the 42-day clause from the government’s counterterrorism bill.
Smith said a different version would be put into new legislation even though it wouldn’t be automatic. Prosecutors would have to apply to a court each time they wanted a terrorism suspect held for that long, and Parliament would have to vote on each case if the court agreed to it.
The government had said the initial proposal, endorsed by the House of Commons in June by a margin of only nine votes, was needed to fight the complex international terrorist threats facing Britain.
The issue has divided Britons in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks raised fears of terrorism. At the time, there was a two-day limit on detention without charge, which could be increased to seven days with court permission.
The government’s effort to strengthen counterterrorism provisions gathered pace after suicide bombers killed 52 rush-hour commuters in London in July 2005.
Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered his first major defeat in the House of Commons later that year when he tried to extend the limit to 90 days. Eventually, a 28-day limit was enacted — the longest detention period in 15 Western democracies studied by the British rights group Liberty, said spokeswoman Jen Corlew.
Several prominent politicians, writers and the Council of Europe had attacked the 42-day detention plan as a threat to civil liberties. The council, Europe’s top human-rights watchdog, said the proposal would have imperiled the right to a fair trial.
Blair and his successor, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, have maintained that extra time is needed to build cases against terrorism suspects because of their extensive contacts overseas and their use of multiple computers.
Opponents of the 42-day measure note that there have not been any cases when 28 days were needed to evaluate a suspect and say this shows that the extension is unnecessary.
