A lawyer for a group of foreign men detained indefinitely without charge under emergency anti-terror laws told the Law Lords today that those government powers threatened the very values there were designed to protect.

Nine foreign men held under the controversial Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act are seeking to overturn a Court of Appeal decision which backed the powers of David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, to detain them without charge or trial.

Their pleas are being heard by a court made up of nine Law Lords, rather than the usual five, because of the constitutional importance of the legal challenge. The Appellate Committee of the House of Lords is the UK's highest court. The judges are headed by Lord Bingham, a former Lord Chief Justice.

Ben Emmerson QC, representing seven of the detainees, opened the hearing in the Moses Room next to the main chamber of the Lords. He said: "Despite the complexity of some submissions in this case, the ultimate issue is really very straightforward.

"We say in a democracy it is unacceptable to lock up potentially innocent people without trial or without any indication when, if ever, they are going to be released.

"We say it is doubly unacceptable for a democracy committed to the principles of equality and anti-discrimination to single out foreign nationals when it is not prepared to apply the same measures to its own nationals."

Mr Emmerson said that no one could doubt that the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York on September 11 were a direct assault on the values of democracy. They represented a new brand of terrorism - highlighted by ruthlessness and a total disregard of human rights.

He added that the reasons those attacks were etched on the world's conscience was not just that they were perpetrated against the world most powerful nation but because of the massive loss of human life.

"There is an inevitable temptation for parliaments and governments to fight fire with fire and set aside legal safeguards which exist within a democratic state," he added.

"We can fall into the trap which terrorism sets for democracy and the rule of law by destroying those values."

Mr Emmerson said that the fundamental issue was whether the Government can lawfully detain a criminal suspect without charge indefinitely.

He said that by derogating obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights to accommodate a power of indefinite detention of foreign nationals on suspicion alone, the Government had "wrongly adopted and permitted measures fundamentally inconsistent with the core values of democracy and justice".

The nine men are among 11 detained under emergency laws rushed through after the September 11 attacks. Civil rights campaigners compare their plight to that of detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre on Cuba, where more than 600 people are being held without charge by the United States amid accusations of torture.

The campaigners say that the laws have been used disproportionately against Muslims and argue that foreigners are unable to fight injustice. Hundreds of demonstrators staged a protest on Sunday outside the top security Belmarsh jail in South London where some of the detainees are held.

Gareth Peirce, who is solicitor for seven of the men, claimed last week that the Government's case against them had been weakened by publication of a letter from Moazzam Begg, a British detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The 36-year-old from Birmingham, who has been in American detention for more than two years, claimed he had been forced under torture to sign false confessions.

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