Justice at the hands of security services is a bizarre paradox. They say, we know you are bad, really bad, and we can prove it. But you are so bad, that we can’t tell you what we know about you, nor show you the evidence against you. But trust us, it’s bad. Just like you.

If you find yourself guilty according to the security services, the onus is on you to prove yourself innocent - against unknown accusations.

In Canada, Mohammed Harkat has been under house arrest for the past two years, unable to even go to the supermarket without advising the police 48 hours in advance. He spent four years in prison. No charge, no trial, just the word of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

In New Zealand, Ahmed Zaoui spent two years in jail and two and a half more on bail as a result of being labelled a “risk to national security” by the Security Intelligence Service. In the end the SIS quietly dropped the allegations after reassessing the evidence, and Zaoui was finally free to start life as a refugee.

Politicians in the UK are wrangling over their ability to extend the length of time someone can be held by police without being charged. There’s a strong push to extend the current 28-day limit to 42 days – UK Liberty has an interesting discussion of the issue here.

The United States is the extremist in this collective, of course, with the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay prison and recent allegations that they have been holding people in “prison boats”. But that’s another rant entirely, for now I’ll stick to discussing the moderates.

British police want some kind of pre-emptive arrest: they say they should arrest a person before he or she commits a terrible crime, but that they then need more time to analyse and gather evidence to put together a compelling charge. Picture it: we think you’re going to steal a car, so we’ll arrest you for six weeks while we meticulously search everything we can to find some evidence of your car theft intentions.

It sounds ridiculous when you use that example. But swap “steal a car” for a terrorism-related charge, and some people start to think it’s a good idea. I think that can partly be put down to hysteria surrounding the possibility of terrorism in the UK – and partly because those that support the idea are not Arab nor Muslim and so have little fear that these laws might be used on them, for the moment at least.

Appalling as the proposed UK system is, the New Zealand and Canadian examples are far worse. Zaoui and Harkat have never been charged. They have been held in prison for years without going to trial, without being told why, without the chance to refute any evidence against them.

I don’t know the background of Harkat. For all I know he may have been involved in illegal activities. But he should be given the opportunity to put forward his side of the story. We should be disgusted by the way a modern, western justice system is treating him – just like we were appalled by the way New Zealand treated Ahmed Zaoui for four years.

Other posts by Katie Llanos-Small