Naive and disillusioned Britons returning from Syria should not be prosecuted, says terror law watchdog

Many Britons who have returned from Islamic State territory are not being prosecuted and instead need to be reintegrated because they were simply naive, the Government’s terrorism laws watchdog has said.

Hundreds of Britons who went to Syria or Iraq in the past few years are already thought to have returned, but the authorities have decided not to charge them, Max Hill QC said.

He spoke days after Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, said the country faced an intense threat from Islamist terrorism, with plots now being hatched at a tempo he had never seen before.

Around 850 Britons are thought to have travelled to Syria since 2011. Around 120 are believed dead fighting for groups including Islamic State and around half those remaining are thought to have already returned home.

Police and security leaders have in the past warned of the prospect of battle-hardened jihadists returning to continue their struggle by carrying out attacks on the streets of Britain.

Mr Hill, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, told the BBC: “We are told we do have a significant number already back in this country who have previously gone to Iraq and Syria.

“That means that the authorities have looked at them and looked at them hard and have decided that they do not justify prosecution and really we should be looking at reintegration and moving away from any notion that we are going to lose a generation from this travel.”

He went on: “It’s not a decision that MI5 and others will have taken lightly. They, I am sure, will have looked intensely at each individual on return.

“But they have left space, and I think they are right to do so, for those who travelled, but who travelled out of a sense of naivety, possibly with some brainwashing along the way, possibly in their mid teens and who return in a sense of utter disillusionment. We have to leave space for those individuals to be diverted away from the criminal courts.”

Counter terrorism sources confirmed that “not a huge proportion” of returnees had been prosecuted. They said some of the others are facing different security restrictions, such as tags, curfews and monitoring.

Mr Hill said if there was evidence those returning had committed crimes, then they should be charged.

A counter terrorism source said officers tried to prosecute whenever they could, but it was often hard to prove someone had committed a crime in a war zone.

Richard Barrett, a former director of global counter-terrorism at MI6, said Britons had gone to Syria for “highly individual” reasons.

He said the authorities had to assess them on an individual basis to determine “what sort of threat they are likely to pose, but not just immediately but also of course in the longer term”.

He said: “Many of them went to join something, join something new, something that looked bright and attractive and satisfied some of the needs in their lives and probably found that didn’t exist out there and so came back highly disillusioned.

“Also someone going off to join the Islamic state is not likely initially to be somebody going off to be a domestic terrorist, they seem to me to be two different motivations.”