It now emerges that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), has ruled that this Act is illegal.
It is interesting that this Government, which has done more to transfer our powers to European Institutions, than any other, and insisted on enshrining ECHR rights into British Law, has been hoisted on its own petard. The European Court argues that there is in the Act:
"a clear risk of arbitrariness in granting such broad discretion to the police office....the use of the coercive powers to require an individual to submit to a detailed search of their person and belongings amounted to a clear interference with the right to respect for private life".
The Government's response to the ECHR ruling has been to Appeal. It will be fascinating to see what they will do if - as expected - the Appeal fails. Will any of our ancient liberties be restored? Somehow I doubt it.
In the 1970's I was pestered by Harlow police all the time, my crime ? Driving a moped. 27 times I was stopped, when I chose to walk, again I was stopped and searched three times, that's the lean up against a car or wall and spread your legs searches.
ReplyDeleteIf this was your first stop by the police you can count yourself very lucky....... but then you didn't grow up in Harlow.
An excellent post, Rob. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, a time when there was, save among the criminal element in our society, universal respect for, and confidence in, our police.
ReplyDeleteYet that respect and confidence seems to have disintegrated during the current government's term of office. The abuse by the police of their powers under the anti-terrorist legislation coupled with the widespread perception that the police are now forced to waste so much time on red tape, meeting bizarre government crime solving and political targets and on absurdly bureaucratic form filling that they've little time for real policing, are key reasons why respect has evaporated during the past decade.
So broad and worrying are the abuses of police powers under ant-terrorist legislation that this abuse appears to me to have thrown our criminal justice system into confusion and disrepute. None of us really know what is legal conduct and what is illegal any longer and such confusion undermines the, once famed, transparency, fairness and effectiveness of British justice.
Just a few examples of abuses of this Act: 83 year old Walter Wolfgang, life long Labour party member and refugee from Nazi Germany roughed up and dragged out of a Labour Party conference by security thugs then detained by police under the anti-terrorists legislation for merely 'shouting': "Nonsense!" to Jack Straw. A man who exercised the British right to freedom of speech by wearing a tee shirt with an anti-Blair slogan was detained by the police under the anti-terrorist legislation on the grounds it was disrespectful to the Prime Minister - that is now an anti-terrorist offence?!? That man, I understand, was at a later date picked up by the police for being in an area where there was a terrorist bomb attack because he was on record as having been stopped under the anti-terrorist legislation for a tee shirt offence! Unbelievable! Protestors kettled, wound up and badly physically abused at the G20 conference; that, I presume, also occurred as the result of abuse of the remit of this legislation. Most of us saw on TV the abusive events leading up to the tragic death of an innocent newspaper seller, who was pushed over by police with dogs as he was trying to walk home after the G20 demonstration.
There seems to be in our country, among some sectors of the police, a new, aggressive policing ethos which should be a cause of concern to all of us. Isn't this aggressive ethic encouraged by giving police too much discretionary and arbitrary power under the anti-terrorist legislation? If the anti-terrorist legislation can be used to persecute an innocent 83 year old 'heckler' and an innocent man for wearing a joke tee shirt criticising the Prime Minister, there's something very wrong with our criminal justice system and our system of policing. That wrong badly needs to be put right, until it is, none of us are safe from arbitrary abuse of police and government power.