Hicham Yezza, 31, and Rizwaan Sabir, 23, were held in custody for six days after being arrested on 14 May 2008 before being released without charge. It later emerged they had been arrested on the basis of the presence a publicly-available declassified document on their computers; downloaded from the U.S. government's website and available on Amazon.com. The document was being used for a supervised PhD proposal and the arrest of the university members brought questions about academic freedom, civil liberties, and racism in Britain to the fore.

Hicham Yezza, an Algerian national who had been resident in the UK for twelve years and undertaken undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Nottingham, was immediately transferred to immigration custody for automatic deportation without trial, sparking an successful international campaign [2]. Mr. Yezza successfully challenged his deportation and stood to face immigration charges and in March he was found guilty based on evidence
gathered in the context of the anti-terror searches. Our campaign contended that Mr Yezza’s status as a former terror suspect interfered with his ability to receive a fair trial. His ordeal resembles other trials of terror
suspects recently described by human rights lawyer Gareth Pierce, where defendants, pre-emptively “stigmatised as potential terrorists”, are prevented from ever receiving justice [2]. He is currently being held in Canterbury prison awaits a hearing which will decide on his application for indefinite leave to remain in the UK, a direct result of the anti-terror arrests one year ago.

The recent terror arrests of 12 men in Liverpool and Manchester, 11 of whom are now facing deportation without having been charged, mirrors Hicham's experience and worryingly suggests that the British government is following a policy of automatically deporting those who are mistakenly or incompetently arrested under terrorism laws. Vernon Coaker, the Policing and Security minister, recently said: "The Government is committed to investing in our counter-terrorist threat and wherever possible seeks to prosecute those involved with terrorism. Where we can't prosecute, we seek to deport, and where we can't deport, we seek to disrupt." Nottingham campaigners see this as an admission of a policy of unfounded and largely extra-judicial automatic deportation for innocent foreign nationals arrested in botched terror raids. [3]

Gearóid Ó Cuinn, a postgraduate student at the university, said: "The atmosphere on British campuses, especially at Nottingham, feels to many of us increasingly xenophobic and racist. We have achieved so much with the Free Hich campaign because we built a coalition across the student and academic body, collecting a diverse group of people who cared about freedom. This includes freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention and deportation. We've lost those freedoms now, but we're fighting to get them back."


[1] www.freehicham.co.uk

[2] Gareth Peirce “Was it like this for the Irish? Gareth Peirce on the position of Muslims in Britain” London Review of Books 10 April 2008.
www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n07/peir01_.html,

[3] Independent - 'Just one in eight terror arrests ends with guilty verdict, admits Home Office'
 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/just-one-in-eight-terror-arrests-ends-with-guilty-verdict-admits-home-office-1684580.html