"Schedule 7": Drawn into the UK anti-terror net...

[Ghost Dog]

Owen Jones, The Guardian

My twin sister, Eleanor, is not a terrorist. It is absurd to have to write this. Three months ago – after travelling to Scotland to attend our grandfather’s funeral – she was detained at Edinburgh airport under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. She was forced to hand over her passwords for her mobile phone and computer; she was interrogated about the political beliefs of her relatives (myself included); and then was driven from the airport to a police station to have her DNA sample and fingerprints taken. After being detained for four hours, she missed her flight back to Berlin, where she lives: the police refused to even pay the cost of a ticket for a new flight.

Here’s the background. My sister took part in July’s protests at the G20 summit in Hamburg. She was sprayed by water cannon and tear gas, witnessed police brutality and, in the melee, fell and injured her legs. She was later arrested on suspicion of being in the anarchist black bloc (she wasn’t), detained for 36 hours and released without charge.

Her first arrest itself represented an attack on the civil liberties of a peaceful protester. The second detention can hardly be construed as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and harass someone exercising their fundamental democratic rights – using legislation supposedly designed to prevent would-be murderers committing atrocities. The Labour MSP Neil Findlay has written to Scotland’s justice minister with a series of questions about my sister’s case: including whether the detention was fair, justified or proportionate; about the tactics Police Scotland used against “a wholly innocent UK citizen”; and asking who authorised the action.

No one rational disputes the need for laws to protect people from the threat of terror. It is not unreasonable, after all, to expect anti-terrorism legislation to be used to target terrorists. When such laws were introduced, critics suggested they would threaten civil liberties and infringe on the rights of the innocent. They were smeared as scaremongers, and yet they were vindicated...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/26/schedule-7-terrorism-act-2000-activism-civil-rights-ethnic-minorities

[geardaddy]

1. God damn it!

WTF!

[Ghost Dog]

2. Yes. As Owen Jones explains:

... Schedule 7, a legacy of New Labour authoritarianism, grants the police sweeping and unchecked powers at the border: at airports, ports and international train stations. “It allows the police to detain and question someone without any suspicion of wrongdoing,” says Millie Graham Wood, a solicitor at Privacy International. “And so they are often suffered by people who have done nothing wrong.”...

... As my sister puts it, white people like her are not normally the victims. Schedule 7 reeks of racism. According to Liberty, in 2010/11 45% of those targeted were Asian, 21% black, and a mere 8% white. The police can question those they detain for up to six hours, and keep their possessions for up to a week, while the detained have no right to remain silent and no right to a lawyer. Their basic civil rights are suspended.

The forcible downloading of data from laptops and mobile phones is chilling too...

[Denzil_DC]

3. Schedule 7's long been a cause for severe concern.

The Terrorism Act 2000 was so broadly drafted that under Section 43, people have been victimized by police officers just for taking photographs in public spaces in the past.

Schedule 7 of the Act last gained major notoriety because it was part of the basis why Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was detained in transit through Heathrow back in 2013, but as Vice pointed out at the time (and so did I in online forums, against quite a bit of pushback, where there was much hysteria that Miranda had been singled out, which is when I really researched it), it had been a cause of concern ever since it was enacted:

Border Officers Were Abusing Schedule 7 Way Before David Miranda

The UK Terrorism Act of 2000 was a real kick in the dick for fans of civil liberties. As well as giving police stop and search powers that were so arbitrary and invasive they were banned by the European Court of Human Rights in 2010, they birthed Schedule 7, which gives port or border authorities the right to detain anyone they want for up to nine hours and question them about terrorism. An added perk for those authorities: If you don't answer their questions, you could be prosecuted and face three months in jail.

Schedule 7 made the headlines earlier this month when David Miranda – the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been publishing information leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – was held at Heathrow airport in an apparent abuse of the legislation. However, while Miranda's case was the first to draw a large amount of press attention, the misuse of Schedule 7 has been going on for a while.

Given the government's preoccupation with Islamic terrorism, it won't shock you to learn that, typically, those detained aren't white. Fifty-six percent of those who've been stopped are from black and minority ethnic communities, a figure that climbs to 77 percent when you take into account those who've been held for more than an hour. Anarchists have also been detained, as have a pair of researchers from Corporate Watch, who've been investigating organisations in Israel that profit from the occupation of Palestine.

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/pp874z/border-officers-were-misusing-schedule-7-way-before-david-miranda

Lat year, the UK Court of Appeal found in this case that Schedule 7 is incompatible with the ECHR.

It's a shame that it takes a celebrity's relative being affected before the whole scandal erupts all over again. As with Miranda, there was at least a shred of pretext for exercising the powers under the Act in Owen Jones's sister's case (in Miranda's case, a bit more than a shred given the nature of what he was carrying), but blameless people are still detained under the Act just because of racial profiling.