UK police accused of arbitrary terrorism arrests The Independent Police Complaint Commission (IPCC) is now investigating 25 complaints of people who have been questioned by law-enforcement bodies in UK airports without, as the complainants are claiming, any particular reason. The police says that it was guided by the so-called Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act. This law allows the UK police to detain practically anyone whom they may choose to suspect of involvement in terrorist activity and interrogate him or her for up to 9 hours. If the detained person refuses to cooperate with the police, he or she may face up to 3 months in prison. Some of the people who filed in their complaints claim that they were detained because of their ethnic affiliation. The Scotland Yard, in its turn, denies this. It should be noted that the Home Office does not recommend to detain people because of their ethnicity or religion. IPCC has put forward an ultimatum that the police should report within 7 days over 18 of these 25 complaints. As for the other 7 complaints, they involve other forces than the police – but, as IPCC says, in contrast to the police, these forces are fully cooperating with it. IPCC and Scotland Yard have been at loggerheads for several months because the police refuses to cooperate with the Complaint Commission and explain why these people were actually arrested. Schedule 7 was the law under which the British police arrested Brazilian citizen David Miranda, a cooperator of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who, in its turn, is a cooperator of the well-known whistleblower Edward Snowden. Miranda was flying to Rio de Janeiro, where he lives with Greenwald, with a transit stop in London, but was detained in the London Heathrow airport, because the police suspected that he was carrying some leaked classified materials to Greenwald. It turned out later that he was really carrying thousands of classified documents on computer media, and now a criminal investigation against him is under way. However, many people still have doubts whether the law with which the police backed his arrest was really appropriate here. The IPCC said it was supervising 18 current investigations into the use of Schedule 7 powers by Metropolitan Police. The watchdog said it used its powers in February to order the Met to “investigate the rationale for stopping and questioning people under Schedule 7”. The force agreed to investigate – but then refused to hand over the resulting documents. Kevin Maxwell, a former counter-terrorism officer at Heathrow Airport, who won a case of victimization, discrimination and harassment against the Metropolitan Police in 2010, told the tribunal that officers were under pressure to complete monthly targets. “The claimant observed other officers stopping passengers despite having witnessed no suspicious activity, based on the color of their skin or an Asian or Somali-sounding name,” the tribunal ruling said, adding, however, that Mr. Maxwell failed to prove that the police was really, first of all, “hunting” for people with Asian or African looks. “If this is not being done properly, it can undermine the integrity of the anti-terrorism system,” Kevin Maxwell says. Scotland Yard said that legal action by IPCC had been “unnecessary” after it claimed to have been “working hard” to strike a deal with the watchdog.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 05:21:11 +0000
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