CITIZENSHIP: FROM RIGHT TO PRIVILEGE > In the wake of 9/11, with the government caught up in the US ‘War on Terror’, the Blair government enacted over 200 pieces of anti-terrorist legislation targeting Islamist terrorism; > It openly cooperated with states known to practise torture, in the Middle East as well as the US, exchanging intelligence, assisting in extraordinary renditions and deporting hundreds on suspicion of involvement in terrorism; > Legislation in 2001 allowed for the indefinite internment of foreign terrorist suspects, and all those detained under the provisions until they were declared unlawful three years later were Muslims; > The control orders and later TPIMs (Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures) which replaced internment, and combined constant surveillance with severe restrictions on movement and communication, were imposed almost exclusively on Muslims, both British and foreign; > Statistics on terrorism-related stop and searches, stops at airports for questioning and arrests all show disproportionate targeting of those of perceived Asian ethnicity and/ or Muslims;44 > In the Trojan Horse affair, heads and governors who had transformed failing Muslimmajority schools into centres of excellence were demonised and smeared as ‘Islamist extremists’ on the basis of a letter known to be false; 45 > The Prevent programme (part of the government’s Contest counter-terrorism policy, which since 2015 imposes a legal duty on teachers, health professionals and youth workers to report suspicions of ‘radicalisation’) initially focussed exclusively on Muslims, and remains Islamophobic in its operation;46 > In 2016, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concern that the ‘Prevent’ duty imposed on public authorities had ‘created an atmosphere of suspicion towards members of Muslim communities’ leading to ‘increased profiling of individuals based on their ethnicity and/or religion’;47 > The 2020 Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Countering Terrorism expressed particular concern about the Prevent duty on teachers, social workers and others as ‘impinging on [their] unique ethical obligations … to those they serve’ and impacting on duties of non-discrimination and rights to freedom of religion and expression and privacy.48 44 See Terrorism in Great Britain: the statistics, House of Commons Research Briefing, October 2021. 45 See the work of Professor John Holmwood, in particular (with Theresa O’Toole) Countering Extremism in British Schools? The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair, Policy Press, 2018 and the New York Times podcast on the affair. 46 Although not for William Shawcross who, according to a leak of his review of Prevent, decries the recent emphasis on far-right extremism which he claims sees people referred for ‘mainstream’ views, and seeks more emphasis on Islamist extremism: Guardian, 16 May 2022. See Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are coming!; see also the People’s Review of Prevent (2022). 47 CERD, Concluding Observations 2016, paras 11, 18. 48 Human Rights impacts of policies aimed at preventing violent extremism, A/HRC/43/46, 2020, para 32. 15