Imagine being arrested; thrown into prison; instantly separated from all you love and live for. Imagine being under house arrest; with every act under scrutiny; with every ambition subject to the cold, calculating will of another. Imagine, through all this, never knowing what the hell you’d done to deserve it; what they even thought you’d done.

That’s precisely what happened to Mahmoud Abu Rideh, now travelling, shaken and bewildered, from the country. That’s exactly what could happen to you under a shadowy system of control orders, secret trials and secret evidence.

British law, however, has taken steps to reject it, as Andy Worthington reports…

Last month, the law lords ruled unanimously – in the case of three detainees subjected to control orders – that depriving people of the right to a fair trial on the basis of secret evidence was unacceptable. As Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the senior law lord, explained: “A trial procedure can never be considered fair if a party to it is kept in ignorance of the case against him.”

It follows, therefore, that the entire system of holding people outside the pre-9/11 parameters of the law has effectively collapsed. Gone is the rationale for secret courts and special advocates who are not allowed to talk to their clients about the secret evidence used against them, and with it has gone the justification for holding people in their own homes or forcibly relocating them to homes in other parts of the country, where the bizarre apparatus of control orders and deportation bail has been operating like a mini-secret state.