You Know What I Want, Nick?
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has asked us to tell him what laws need repealing:
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He’s a brave man, I’ll give him that. But the answers are there in front of his face. Let’s start with the case of Jules Mattson:
On Saturday 26 June, photojournalist Jules Mattsson, who is a minor and was documenting the Armed Forces Day parade in Romford, was questioned and detained by a police officer after taking a photo of young cadets.
According to Mattsson, who spoke to BJP this morning, after taking the photo he was told by a police officer that he would need parental permission for his image. The photographer answered that, legally, he didn’t. While he tried to leave the scene to continue shooting, a second officer allegedly grabbed his arm to question him further.
According an audio recording of the incident, the police officer argued, at first, that it was illegal to take photographs of children, before adding that it was illegal to take images of army members, and, finally, of police officers. When asked under what legislation powers he was being stopped, the police officer said that Mattsson presented a threat under anti-terrorism laws. The photographer was pushed down on stairs and detained until the end of the parade and after the intervention of three other photographers.
Now I know Jules. He’s a good kid and a superb, passionate photographer, and this is is just appalling. Want proof? He recorded it:
The debate about the Metropolitan (and City) Police’s abuse of Section 44 has been waged many times and the arguments have been made more times than I can be bothered to think. But it’s now, once and for all, conclusively been ruled in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights:
In January 2010 the European Court held that section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (the broad police power to stop and search without suspicion) violates the right to respect for private life guaranteed by Article 8 of the Convention on Human Rights (Gillan and Quinton v. UK4158/05 [2010] ECHR 28 (12 January 2010)). The claimants received £500 each by way of compensation.
The European Court has now rejected the UK’s application to appeal to the court’s Grand Chamber, meaning that the decision is final. This leaves stop and search powers in further disarray. The Home Secretary has already announced an “urgent review” of the powers after the recent admission by the Home Office that thousands of individual searches had been conducted illegally.
It’s clear that Section 44 has to go, but the risk remains that Clegg uses this scheme either to get the country to vent about laws they don’t like, or simply to delete specific laws without confronting the trends and behaviours which led to them in the first place. The cops who attacked Jules Mattson didn’t just cite Section 44 to try to stop him taking perfectly lawful photos – they made all sorts of garbage up in order to intimidate him into not taking photos. There is an institutional prejudice within the ranks against photographers, which was channelled by Section 44, and which would be much harder to root out and stop. New Labour made it abundantly clear they didn’t care one iota about the Met’s excesses. Time will tell if Theresa May cares any more, and this is what I want Nick Clegg to understand and tackle, more than anything.
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Section 44 was not mentioned by the police in Jules Mattsson’s audio. That’s the problem. They mentioned no known law and section, with the possible exception of “breach of the peace”, which is at least an offence, though he didn’t commit it.
Further, section 44 makes no mention of photography whatever. It is used to stop and search, but it’s got nothing to do with photography. There seems to be some myth that it has, even put about by Paul Lewis in The Guardian.
I challenged him about this and he pretended to know already and said his whole point was that section 44 had nothing to do with photography. But that’s not what he said in his article.
Why does it matter? Well, it matters because section 44 can be repealed and nothing need change for photographers. Pinning all your hopes on section 44 is therefore a mistake.
A bigger problem is the whole Terrorism Act 2000 itself. It creates the offence of “preparing” a terrorist act, not just instigating or committing one. The problem here is that the only difference between preparing and not preparing is the intention in your mind. The TA2000 thus criminalised certain varieties of thought. Only actual harm should be criminalised.
This is the heart of the problem, not just section 44.
A bigger problem still, of course, is the seeming ability of the police to act outside the law altogether, without any constitutional means of redress for the victim. If they do this, and continue to get away with it, you can forget the criminal law altogether. It simply becomes irrelevant.
Best Wishes,
Stephen
[...] had the previous week been harassed by the Met, and found himself harassed yet again not a week later. Each time the police suggested he might be [...]
[...] had the previous week been harassed by the Met, and found himself harassed yet again not a week later. Each time the police suggested he might be [...]