It is a rather long article which discusses important points and has some interesting links. I think it is an important topic and deserves attention and it is important to keep the basics in mind.
1) If I go into foreign country to fight on my own initiative without being part of my states armed forces I put myself into a pool of other people. Now if those people are mostly fighting for quite brutal groups, partly with connections to groups who did sponsor terrorism (in Western countries) and share the aim to create a (strict) islamistic state base on (strict) islamistic principles. A stay itself can result in disillusion of Islamic ideas or initiate radicalization, enable me to establish links within a wider social group of radicals.
Even if I have no longer such ideals and behaved as nicely one can in such a war, what the state services can have a hard time to know, I have tagged myself with a lot of markers. All those markers give me a profile which forces the services to employ ressourcs to monitor and check me. It is profiling on excellent grounds.
2) So if it is wise to check, question and monitor me how should the state do it and how should he act from a legal point of view?
As discussed in other topics the persons who have been there have marked themselves and are likely to leave lots of tracable traces and should thus be relatively easy to monitor in a number of ways.
This doesn't mean of course that anyone coming back from Syria after a longer period of time should be quickly thrown into a prison due to special laws and harsh applications. It all depends on the specific cases and the evidence for and against them. In more then a few cases it might indeed be wise and in the public interest to strip them with due process of their citizienship.
Bookmarks