Secret hearings to determine whether suspects should be held without charge during anti-terror investigations are legal, the European court of human rights has ruled.



Dismissing a claim by three Pakistani students that their detention for nearly two weeks breached their rights, the Strasbourg court said UK courts were permitted to hold closed sessions when considering arrest warrants on the grounds of national security.



Sultan Sher, Mohammed Rizwan Sharif and Mohammed Umer Farooq were held by police following a series of anti-terror raids across north-west England in April 2009.



The men, who were in the UK on student visas, were detained for 13 days before ultimately being released without charge. They have since returned home to Pakistan.



The students were brought before a court twice when warrants for their further detention were granted. In their complaints to the ECHR, the students alleged they had been denied any open adversarial process during the hearings at which officers sought to extend their detention.



Some evidence in favour of their continued detention was withheld from them, the ECHR said, and one hearing – on 10 April 2009 at Westminster magistrates court – was held for a short period in closed session.

Part of it, the ECHR judgment said, “was closed to allow the district judge to scrutinise and ask questions about the [police investigation]. The applicants and [their lawyer] were therefore excluded from this part of the hearing. They made no complaint about the procedure at that time.”



The three men were eventually released without charge on 21 April 2009 and served with deportation orders, though they eventually returned voluntarily to Pakistan in September 2009. They had also complained about search operations carried out in their lodgings.

In a majority judgment, the Strasbourg court ruled: “The applicants and their legal advisers had been given reasons for the withholding of certain information. The information to be withheld had been limited to the further inquiries to be conducted, and had been submitted to a judge who, in closed session, had been able to ensure that no material had been unnecessarily withheld from the applicants and to determine, in their interests, whether there had been reasonable grounds for believing that their further detention had been necessary.



“Indeed, even in the absence of express provision in the relevant law, the judge had had the power to appoint a special advocate if he considered such appointment necessary to secure the fairness of the proceedings. Significantly, the applicants had not requested the appointment of a special advocate.”



The ECHR ruled that there had been no violation of their rights to lawful detention or in the way the search was conducted.



One judge, Faris Vehabović, dissented, saying: “I find it unjustified to exclude the applicant and his representative from part of the hearing when this discussion took place, thus removing the possibility that the applicant might dispute the relevance of evidence which was decisive for that extension of detention.”