Tomorrow the battle between liberty and terrorism will enter a dangerous new phase. At a closed court in London, lawyers for the first of eleven suspected terrorists who have been imprisoned without charge will apply for the men to be released on bail.

“It’s time they were freed,” said Gareth Peirce, the campaigning civil rights lawyer. “We think the case for bail for the detainees, who have spent up to three years in prison without even knowing the evidence against them, is overwhelming.”

These foreign suspects are all regarded by the government and the intelligence services as serious threats to the security of the nation. Yet the law lords, the highest court in the land, have ruled that their detention without trial is unlawful.

The battle of what to do with them sums up a crucial dilemma: can the West protect itself against extreme Islamic jihadists without compromising the very freedoms that it wants to defend? It is a fine line to tread. Among the men seeking release, for example, is an Algerian who can be identified only as A. According to judicial files tracked down by The Sunday Times, A previously “supported and assisted” an extreme Islamic group called GIA, which massacred civilians in Algeria, sometimes wiping out entire villages. It is also accused of killing more than 100 people, mostly Europeans, since 1993.

The authorities say that A “belongs to and/or is a member of” GSPC, another Islamic group that urged followers in one video to “fight all the sick unbelievers” and to “kill in the name of Allah until you are killed”.

In Britain, A is said to have procured £230,000 of telecommunications equipment, including satellite phones, for use by the Islamic mujaheddin fighting in Chechnya. One of his close associates is Abu Doha, regarded as a senior Al-Qaeda figure, who is at present in custody in Britain, awaiting deportation to America.

A special panel of judges who heard this evidence and much more concluded that A is: “an international terrorist . . . his presence in the United Kingdom is a risk to national security”.

Should such a man go free? Just as he and the other detainees bid for release, other suspects are also returning to Britain’s streets. Last week, four men who had been held by US forces at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were sent to Britain where they walked free. They too are “a significant threat”, claimed the Pentagon.

There is one big problem: none of them has been convicted of a terrorist crime in British courts. In Britain individuals are innocent until proven guilty; they have a right to liberty and fairness before the law — until now.

Last week the government, faced with watching A and his fellow inmates walk free, decided that its priority was beating the terrorists rather than the principles of freedom.

“My judgment is that there remains a public emergency threatening the life of the nation,” said Charles Clarke, the home secretary, in the Commons last Wednesday. He went on to propose giving himself sweeping new powers to “impose controls” on anyone, British citizen or foreign national, who was suspected of terrorist links.

Those controls would range from surveillance and tagging to bans on using telephones or the internet. In the worst cases, individuals could face house arrest.

The most startling proposal was that Clarke wants to use such power simply on his say-so: no formal charge, no court ruling, no public test of evidence. Just the decision of a politician, subject only to secret judicial review. It is, he conceded, a “very substantial increase in the executive powers of the state”.

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