In a serious indictment of the horrific authoritarianism of New Labour’s Home Office, the UK Supreme Court has shot down its policy of refusing asylum to gay refugees from countries such as Iran because they could avoid persecution by being ‘discreet’:
Two gay men who said they faced persecution in their home countries have the right to asylum in the UK, the Supreme Court has ruled.
The panel of judges said it had agreed “unanimously” to allow the appeals from the men, from Cameroon and Iran.
They had earlier been refused asylum on the grounds they could hide their sexuality by behaving discreetly.
It was an inhuman policy, which no doubt Alan Johnson will go back on the TV politics shows to defend. And the counter-argument of course is that anyone could pretend they’re gay in order to claim asylum, but of course it’s the job of the UK Border Agency to determine the legitimacy of all asylum claims. Brendan Keenan is right when he says:
Equally important is that while one paragraph makes reference to stereotypes of gay men enjoying Kylie Minogue and “exotically coloured cocktails” (paragraph 78), it does so only to make the broader point that sexuality is a living thing, expressed in infinitely different and individual ways, and that as a result each individual’s case must be treated with the respect and attention it deserves, rather than looking solely at some prescribed categories of behaviour or preconceptions.
And Lord Hope got it equally right however in the ruling, when he said:
“To compel a homosexual person to pretend that his sexuality does not exist or suppress the behaviour by which to manifest itself is to deny his fundamental right to be who he is.
“Homosexuals are as much entitled to freedom of association with others who are of the same sexual orientation as people who are straight.”
The court said it would be passing detailed guidance to the lower courts about how to treat such cases in the future.
We live in a bizarre political landscape when Theresa May thanks the Supreme Court for justifying her Tory Home Office’s liberal position on this.
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.
The ConDemNation coalition set its sights on returning government to adhering to the rule of law, and Deputy PM Nick Clegg has promised a wholescale rollback of New Labour’s authoritarian project, but of course their record is already patchy – check out prisoners’ voting rights, the DNA database and control orders as just three examples. One unexpected partial step in the right direction involves the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA):
Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that [ISA] registration, due to begin next month, has been put on hold.
There will be a review of the entire vetting and barring scheme, with a scaling back to “common-sense levels”.
The government says the vetting scheme would have been “disproportionate and overly burdensome”.
Mrs May told the BBC that the measures were “draconian”.
“You were assumed to be guilty until you were proven innocent, and told you were able to work with children,” she said.
“All sorts of groups out there were deeply concerned about this and how it was going to affect them.
“There were schools where they were very concerned that foreign exchanges could be finished as a result of this, parents were worried about looking after other people’s children after school.”
The government is now contacting 66,000 organisations, including charities, voluntary groups and education authorities, to tell them that the planned registration is being cancelled.
Excellent news, really quite an impressive step in the right direction, particularly by a Conservative Party which in the past has been so succeptible to moral panics. In fact it’s highly impressive that May has used the term ‘draconian’ to describe the scheme, but it remains to be seen what this ‘scaling-back’ will involve. The ISA has already caused significant damage to the social fabric, presuming as it does that everyone is a paedophile unless they can prove otherwise. The Vetting and Barring Scheme was one of the most serious blights on the rule of law under New Labour, allowing the ISA to decide on people’s suitability as ‘safe’ to work with ‘vulnerable’ people (which would inevitably widen in its scope and definition over time) based on heresay and personal prejudice, with the most threadbare of rights of appeal.
The ISA, left unchecked, will send the message to younger people that everyone older than them is a potential threat, will make it more difficult for younger people to learn how to risk assess meaningfully for themselves, and will allow government to make decisions which are best suited to local people and local communities. After all the Soham murders, which the ISA was set up in response to, weren’t caused by an absence of child protection at the school which Ian Huntley worked at. And Huntley would never have worked at that school if existing protection provisions had been properly adhered to, and only gained contact with Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells because of their association with his girlfriend. The ISA could never have prevented that, indeed such a bureaucracy will never adequately be able to detect child abuse, which is invariably perpetrated by someone children already know (and who won’t be on a database). Is there a problem with paedophilia and child abuse? Of course, but it’s not best tackled through over-reliance on a database, nor by subverting the rule of law. We can only hope that the coalition really has understood that it can’t prevent risk, can’t protect everyone, and must allow employers and voluntary organisations to exercise their own expertise and discretion.
The only credible solution would be for the ISA to be wound up.
There’s a fight under way behind the scenes between the ConDemNation coalition partners over the Human Rights Act. The Tories have long wanted to supplant the Human Rights Act (HRA) with a British Bill of Rights, on the one hand not trying to extract the country from the European Convention on Human Rights, but also trying to, as Helena Kennedy puts it:
“protect our freedoms from state encroachment” on the one hand and “encourage greater social responsibility” on the other.
She then goes on to add:
No explanation is given as to how to achieve these triangulated aims without weakening the protections we now have in the HRA.
It’s also not quite clear what those aims actually mean in practice. The language is quite reminiscent of New Labour’s similar idea of a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, although when discussed at the Convention on Modern Liberty early last year the idea was kicked thoroughly into touch for failing to identify what additional responsibilities should be codified other than to obey existing criminal law. Both parties have in recent years tried very hard to conflate civil rights with human rights, and have notably attacked the latter when rulings under the HRA haven’t been to their political benefit. But that’s not a sufficient reason to replace the Act, quite the opposite in fact, particularly, as Richard Norton-Taylor acknowledges:
All the Human Rights Act, brought in by the Blair government, really did was incorporate the convention into UK domestic law, avoiding long and expensive delays in disputed European court cases.
And as of an interview in the Times yesterday morning the Deputy Prime Minister wasn’t having any watering down of the HRA or any suggestion of its repeal. Clegg said:
“Any government would tamper with it at its peril.”
In response, Theresa May, the new and already illiberal Home Secretary has seemed to back down:
May was asked about the manifesto promise in an interview on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, she downplayed the significance of this pledge. “We did say that we thought the Human Rights Act was not working in certain areas,” she said.
She went on: “We are currently in discussions with our coalition partners about what we will be doing in this area.”
‘Discussions with our coalition partners’? We can only hope they went along the lines of ’you tamper with it at your peril’, but there are pressures for both sides to do just that. The HateMail has unsurprisingly gone on the offensive:
A flagship Tory pledge to tear up the Human Rights Act has been watered down in the coalition pact with the Liberal Democrats.
In opposition, the Conservatives repeatedly promised to replace Labour’s controversial legislation with a Bill of Rights.
But Government sources said last night that an independent commission would now be established to examine the ‘feasibility’ of the move.
‘Are we going to replace the Human Rights Act with a Bill of Rights? Very possibly,’ said one. ‘But the commission is going to look into all that.’
“A coalition that has attempted to tie itself together with the language of civil liberties cannot now renege on fundamental human rights.
Given the way in which Liberal Democrats all the way up to the Deputy Prime Minister vowed to defend our Human Rights Act, any attempt to dilute it would spell the end of this Coalition – and rightly so.
Governments like people are bound together with common values not vested interests. There is nothing more British than the free speech, fair trials, personal privacy and rule against torture protected by the HRA.”
Yet the final coalition agreementaccepts this commission. We have to hope that its findings aren’t against retaining the HRA – both for our sakes, and for the Deputy Prime Minister’s political future. Helena Kennedy concludes:
it may be very tempting for the Liberal Democrats to carve out victories on some areas of reform by making concessions elsewhere. This is why we have to make it clear that the terrain of human rights must not be the ground on which any further deals are done. Human rights have to be non-negotiables in this new political landscape.
Experience shows that a taste for human rights acquired in opposition can soon wear off in government. Once comfortable behind their desks, new ministers tend soon to find the very repressive and authoritarian measures they decried in opposition rather congenial and useful once they sit in government. Let’s hope that the novelty of coalition government can buck that trend.
And it’s why we will abolish the Human Rights Act and introduce a new Bill of Rights, so that Britain’s laws can no longer be decided by unaccountable judges.
It’s a second gripe about the HRA, it isn’t related to the first, and is a common refrain from the Right – ‘unaccountable’ or ‘activist’ judges must be stopped from interpreting codified, semi- or actual constitutional laws, because it interferes with the legislators’ political agendas. But to suggest the Act is at fault because judges have been free to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights from a British perspective makes no sense other than a political one – the judges and the Act get in the way, and the Tories would prefer they themselves had control over human rights law in the UK. Except the UK would still be covered by the convention.
The immediate effect would be to effectively deny access to the European Court for those who really need it because they simply wouldn’t be able to afford it – it’s dog whistle politics, Tories agreeing amongst themselves that some people deserve access to human rights, and not others. But Helena Kennedy is right – human rights are human rights – they are (and must be kept) universal. A replacement, which the final Coalition Agreement hints at, would water down the principle of universality and endanger those most in need of human rights protection. Clegg surely understands that, and given the rumours that all other disagreements in the coalition are being referred to similar ‘commissions’, it does look as though this battle will remain at stalemate. Any other outcome would surely smash the coalition into smithereens.
Landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests.
Who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.
A spirit this government will draw on as we deliver our programme for political reform: a power revolution.
A fundamental resettlement of the relationship between state and citizen that puts you in charge.
‘Much in this new Government statement accords with the BHA’s policies we set out in our own manifestos ahead of the election and with the principles of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. We particularly welcome moves to increase freedom of speech, and a reformed House of Lords which, by being fully elected, would necessarily remove the right of Bishops to sit in our second chamber.’
‘We also look forward to making our case for the repeal and revision of unjust, restrictive and discriminatory laws, such as those which require compulsory worship on our school children – a clear violation of their freedom of conscience – and those which unfairly restrict the right to free speech and protest.’
I think Copson is generally right but there are serious problems here. Clegg’s ideas are laudable, but there are as yet no indications as to how he thinks he’ll implement them – moving children of asylum seekers from one detention centre to another (particularly one with a notorious reputation) is not a remotely adequate solution. Much of the push towards ID cards came from within the civil service itself, and there is still an entrenched authoritarian culture in government agencies which needs urgent tackling; just yesterday the new government took the same stand on control orders as its predecessor.
I don’t just expect a repeal of New Labour’s surveillance state laws, I expect a change in culture to uphold the rule of law and to abide by evidence-based policy making. That means not just accepting the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling on the National DNA Database, but abiding by rulings against denying prisoners the vote and on the legality of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. I’m worried that now in government Clegg is going to pick and choose what works for him and what doesn’t and not challenge the vested interests, defeat of whom really would make the “most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great enfranchisement of the 19th Century” much more than overexcited hyperbole.
Geoffrey Robertson asks whether new Home Secretary Theresa May (and indeed new Deputy PM Clegg) will see reason on Gary McKinnon’s behalf, following her party’s and the Lib Dems’ long opposition to his extradition:
The first acid test for Britain’s new government is not the economy, but whether it is capable of an act of simple humanity. Can Theresa May deliver on the repeated promise of Tory and Lib Dem leaders to end the torment inflicted by the state on Gary McKinnon, the hacker with Asperger’s syndrome, whom the Home Office wants to send to lengthy imprisonment and likely suicide in a US jail? His courtroom cruelty is scheduled to begin again on 24 May: the time has come to end it, once and for all.
So, over to May, then. Her main difficulty will be to override her Home Office advisers, who have for years fought an unremitting, expensive and merciless battle against this poor man and his indomitable mother. They will, perhaps, tell their minister that if she reverses the Smith-Johnson decision, the Americans might take her to court for judicial review. But this is unrealistic: the Obama administration is unlikely to challenge a decision of the new British government. And even if it does, it is unlikely to be successful. And even if that happens, parliament is sovereign and can sweep away any adverse court decision simply by passing the Gary McKinnon (Freedom from Extradition) Act (2010).
Of course the truth is even simpler than that. Alan Johnson admitted that he did have the power to stop McKinnon’s extradition – he was just loath to use it for fear of setting an unwelcome precedent. Theresa May has an enormous task on her hands, not just to prove to a sceptical public about her suitability to be Equalities Minister, but to prove that she’s less of a hostage to the (as Robertson puts it) ‘uncivil servants’ in her department than her immediate two (if not four) predecessors. If this coalition is to mean anything, if its civil liberties agenda is going to have any believability whatsoever then at the very least Gary McKinnon’s extradition should be halted. Given that what evidence there is wouldn’t stand up in court (and none is needed to extradite him to the US) no further action should probably be taken against him.
If you need last minute proof why New Labour is no longer fit to govern, check out Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s defence of the government’s policy of destituting asylum seekers:
”What people see is a sort of ”Euro-friendly” that would have us in the single currency. They would have an amnesty for illegal immigrants, they would allow asylum seekers to work, which is utter, utter madness.”
I think that’s an appalling, inhuman position to take. New Labour’s policy of forced destitution of asylum seekers has been one of the many low points of their period in office, but Cathy Newman has gone further and fact-checked Johnson’s wider claim that it was ‘madness’ because 83% of asylum seekers were found not to have had a genuine claim:
His 83 per cent figure ignores 10 per cent of asylum claims which were granted leave to stay in the UK on humanitarian or discretionary grounds – making it hard to dismiss these as not genuine.
He also ignores the cases subsequently found to have genuine merit on appeal – just over a quarter of those that make it through to an appeal tribunal.
That’s not to dispute that the majority of asylum claims are rejected. But given the context in which Johnson cited the statistic and the need to be careful about the way figures are presented on such an emotive subject, we rate his claim fiction.
Good old Alan Johnson. The party which is currently promoting ‘fairness for all’ clearly means nothing of the sort.
Bungling officials have labelled 15,000 innocent people as criminals in the past six years.
The blunders by the Criminal Records Bureau, a Home Office agency, amount to around seven smears every day.
The victims discovered they had been branded sex offenders, violent thugs or fraudsters when they had a CRB check before a new job. Many went through lengthy appeals to clear their names.
Our Freedom Of Information probe found the CRB coughed up an incredible £290,000 last year alone in “apology payments” to the worst-affected victims.
Most of the bungles involved CRB checks being mixed up, or incorrect details being given out by staff.Others involved police releasing information which was recorded wrongly when an offence was committed.
This is the effect of large-scale state bureaucracy on society. It’s being reflected by the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), it would be reflected through the National Identity Register, and it’s downright sinister. Supporters of the government’s authoritarian agenda insist ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about’, but evidence such as this keeps coming up to prove otherwise. Using a contracted-out agency to determine for employers and voluntary organisations who’s worthy and who’s not worthy in society will inevitably skew the entire basis of human relationships, and make what might otherwise be minor administrative errors catastrophies for those affected by them. It’s shameful how prepared this government has been to reduce people down to mere statistics on databases, when the evidence has been that the databases are inevitably incompetently managed and frequently abused. Far worse though has been the extent to which people have bought into the database state in the name of convenience, given the extent of the misery it’s responsible for.
The Conservatives have dropped their opposition to the government’s crime and security bill, including its controversial provisions to allow the police to retain the DNA profiles of innocent people for up to six years.
Instead of blocking the bill, the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, made a fresh commitment that the Tories would bring in early legislation to ensure the DNA profiles of innocent people arrested for minor offences would not be retained on the national police DNA database.
“We will not seek to block this bill because the indefinite retention of innocent people’s DNA is unacceptable and has been ruled illegal,” said Grayling.He added that on taking office the Conservatives would also change the official guidance to the police, to give people the automatic right to have their DNA withdrawn from the database if have been wrongly accused of a minor crime.The decision follows a threat by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, to ditch the DNA provisions of the crime and security bill entirely, unless the Conservatives dropped their opposition to keeping profiles of innocent people on the database for up to six years.
Johnson said this morning he would pull all provisions from the amendment bill today if the Tories refuse to assent to the government’s plans. The bill is destined for this afternoon’s wash-up session to complete the government’s legislative programme ahead of the dissolution of parliament for the election.
Johnson told Sky News: “This is a basic example of how they [the Tories] talk tough on crime but act soft.”
I don’t normally use strong language on this blog, but what a cynical bastard the Home Secretary is. He’d rather play politics with one of the most important human rights issues in Britain today, and keep the country in breach of the Court’s ruling, instead of ensuring there was a system of appeal for people even to argue for their removal from the database. Yet more undemocratic game playing in the ‘wash up’ period by a government which has presided over the most out-of-touch, corrupt and inept parliament in living memory. The right to privacy and the presumption of innocence are commodities too precious to use as electioneering bargaining chips. When will this abuse end?
The Labour Party has released an advert which attacks David Cameron’s policies on crime. No surprise there you might say, we’re in a pre-election period after all, but what’s done in the video below is actually quite sinister. They present their authoritarian project as absolute and unquestionable – our streets are so unsafe that any human rights-breaching use of the National DNA Database or overextension of CCTV (how many actually work, and how effective is it statistically in either reducing crime or prosecuting it?) are prices worth paying. Cameron standing against Labour’s surveillance society’s and database state’s human rights breaches makes him somehow weak and pro-criminal. This video makes me absolutely furious, but it does help in knowing once and for all that their position isn’t accidental; it’s tactical.
Where’s the evidence that retaining DNA profiles of innocent people on the scale (and without any debate) perpetrated by the Home Office has actually led to more matches and more convictions? Oh there isn’t any. But hey vote Labour folks, after all they have policies which may breach human rights, but they make you safer. Except they don’t. Instead we have police forces which fail adequately to protect the public, but admitting to that wouldn’t be a vote winner in marginal seats. This started out as a government committed to human rights; its third attempt at retaining power proves it’s now more interested in power. That’s something we should be afraid of. New Labour, New Danger.
“We have been on hunger strike since Friday protesting about the length of time we have spent in detention here,” said Aisha, who has been in Yarl’s Wood for three months. “We have been locked in the hallway all day – five ladies have fainted because they have not eaten since Friday. No one has come to give them any medical attention.
“I had an asthma attack, but no one would come to give me my inhaler. I’m very weak. But we will stay on hunger strike for as long as it takes.”
Campaigners condemned the response of the authorities at the centre, accusing them of using a “kettling” technique to trap the women.
“The women are currently trapped in an airless hallway,” said Cristel Amiss, of Black Women’s Rape Action Project. “Women should be allowed back into their rooms immediately; there should be an immediate investigation.”
The Home Office confirmed the disturbance, saying that 40 women were involved, and insisted the measures were temporary until the women could be reintegrated into the centre.
“The wellbeing of detainees is of paramount concern, which is why healthcare staff are at the scene to monitor developments,” said David Wood, strategic director at the UK Border Agency. “The detainees will be integrated back into the centre at the earliest opportunity.”
The women’s demands are listed on this Facebook page. There will be a demonstration against Serco, who manage the immigration detention centre, on 12th February.
Home Office minister Meg Hillier said that the £277m of revenue expected in the scheme’s first three years is intended to cover the estimated costs of both the Vetting and Barring Scheme and the Criminal Records Bureau. She was responding to written parliamentary questions from James Brokenshire, her Conservative shadow counterpart.
The cost for each application will reflect the anticipated average cost of £64 for each application, she said. Some £28 of this will be the cost of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), which is responsible for running the scheme, and £36 for the services of the Criminal Records Bureau.
The fee is charged to people who apply for clearance to be allowed to work with organisations for children and vulnerable adults. Since 12 October last year people have been checked on a voluntary basis, but from June this year it will be compulsory.
Brokenshire also asked for an estimate of the number of people who are likely to be referred to the ISA because of fears that they pose a risk. The minister said that in the first year of operation this is estimated at 28,000.
So the biggest and most unnecessary bureaucracy in modern times has found a way to manage to pay for itself. What a shock. It’s fascinating that the only questions which are being asked of it in parliament are technical and budgetary. What about the immoral nature of the ISA? What about its surefire inability to detect genuine abuse of children and ‘vulnerable’ groups? What about the freedom the ISA has to bar people from specified work based on supposition and guesswork? What about the outrageous presumption the organisation makes, that everyone is a paedophile unless they can prove otherwise? What about the fact that no need has been demonstrated for this organisation even to exist? Alarm bells should be ringint that even now those aren’t the questions being asked by parliament.
We have a budget deficit of about £178 billion, but New Labour can still find the money to keep locking people up:
The £4.24bn bill for the government’s prison building programme is unsustainable and the cash would be better spent on rehabilitation and prevention so as to cut crime, says a Commons select committee report on justice published tomorrow.
The MPs say the prison building scheme is at present a “costly mistake” that will take jail capacity in England and Wales to 96,000 by 2014, making it the prison capital of western Europe.
The report, Cutting Crime: the Case for Justice Reinvestment, is based on a two-year inquiry by a cross-party group of MPs. It discloses that the £4.24bn cost of creating 10,000 extra prisoner places by 2014, from 86,000, has “more or less been guaranteed by the Treasury” regardless of the coming squeeze on public spending.
The MPs claim the government “is wedded to a prison-building agenda” despite overwhelming evidence showing jail is not the most effective way of reducing reoffending for many people. At the same time the justice ministry is being asked to make £1.3bn of cost savings.
“This forecast represents an incarceration rate of 169 per 100,000 in England and Wales, the highest proportion in western Europe,” says the report. It estimates that the annual cost of keeping someone in jail has reached £40,000 a year per prisoner.
So the government’s authoritarian agenda doesn’t look set to disappear any time soon. Ironic really that they were elected in the first place, considering a ‘lock em up’ policy was one of the many hated by the electorate of the previous Tory administration, and Simon Jenkins shows the scale of the explosion in criminalisation under New Labour:
Labour has created more than 3,000 new offences since 1997, of which 1,472 at the last count were imprisonable. You can go to jail in Britain for not having a licence for a church concert, smoking in a public place, selling a grey squirrel, trans-shipping unlicensed fish, or disobeying a health and safety inspector. In many cases a prison sentence is casually tacked on the end of a statute, like some macho cherry on a cake. Parliamentarians, judges, lawyers, prison officers all complain of overwork – but complain all the way to the bank.
When the justice select committee acknowledges that jail doesn’t work in reducing reoffending, it begs the question why the Home Office should remain so resolute about chucking so many people in jail, particularly when they can’t afford it. New Labour really no longer gives a toss about being tough on the causes of crime. The reason why is clear: cowardice. The Daily HateMail’s response to the report:
The prison population should be slashed by a third – putting 28,000 offenders back on the streets, according to a group of MPs.
The justice select committee says Britain will have 96,000 prisoners by 2014 – the highest incarceration rate in western Europe – but spending £4.2billion on building the extra 12,000 prison places needed is a ‘mistake’.
The committee wants the prison population to be stabilised at its current level of 84,000 – then slashed by a third.
It would leave 56,000 inmates in jail and put 28,000 criminals on the streets.
They’re terrified of being seen as soft on crime, or at least as being portrayed by the nastiest tabloid as being soft on crime, and 12 years later are as paranoid as ever. I mean why not just explain why it’s not a good idea, stand by the argument and prove it by example? The Right manage to do that with their ideology (even though they never succeed in proving it by example), so why can’t the Left, when they actually could demonstrate the truth of their argument? Why continue to try to outflank the Right by being rightist?
The proposed law is more a rant against homosexuality and the west than a workable piece of legislation intended for Uganda itself. Much of it consists of a list of unfounded claims, starting with the statement that “same sex attraction is not an innate and immutable characteristic”. Infamously, it calls for the execution of gay men found guilty of “aggravated homosexuality” – by which it means those who are HIV positive, or who have sex with someone who is under 18 or disabled. The bill may be amended during its passage through parliament to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment, but that change would be only a gesture to spare the blushes of Uganda’s aid donors. If passed – which looks likely, since its sponsor is a member of Uganda’s ruling party – the bill will continue to write hate into law.
To say that acceptance of homosexuality is a ‘liberal’ or ‘Western’ perspective is essentially to collude in the abuse of gay people around the world. Of course being gay is an innate and immutable characteristic, and to propose the death penalty for HIV positive men and jail for everyone else isn’t just immoral it’s backward. Some will say such a statement is racist, but when was it true that all Ugandans, Africans or black people were homophobic? On the contrary, considering the wide-ranging dangers the bill poses, should we not be allying ourselves with Ugandans opposed to this hate law?
David Bahati, Ndorwa County West minister of parliament, tabled the Bill saying Uganda needed comprehensive legislation to prohibit any form of sexual relations between people of the same sex.
The Bill, according to Bahati, seeks to plug gaps in the Ugandan constitution, and stipulate that marriage is between a man and a woman only. Other unions will not be recognised. And if same sex couples are married abroad, they face life imprisonment.
Practising homosexuality has been illegal in Uganda and is listed in the penal code, though police say it is hard to investigate this crime because “homosexuals operate under cover”.
But the new Bill now forces people in authority to report offences to the police within 24 hours, or they themselves will face fines or up to three years in prison.
Anyone found guilty of committing homosexuality, or advocating homosexuality to a group or assembly, will face a prison sentence. The penalties are up to 10 years in prison or a fine not exceeding $5,500 or both.
The Bill also seeks extra territorial jurisdiction and will apply to any Ugandan involved in a LGBT relationship outside of the country. The Bill also seeks to extradite any Ugandan guilty of the offences it lists.
Under the terms of Britain’s Extradition Act Uganda is covered as a category 2 territory, which, whilst not allowing the extradition of an HIV positive Ugandan, would certainly allow for the extradition of any other Ugandan covered by the country’s gay hate legislation. Should it pass, the Home Office must make it clear that the Act will not be used to allow the infringement of human rights by the Ugandan government, and separately that gay asylum seekers will under no circumstances be returned to Uganda.
This is a law attacking basic human rights and should it pass it must have consequences. The Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CHRCL) acknowledges the scope of this attack:
“In reality this would involve Uganda withdrawing from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its protocols, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.”
The Swedes, who currently hold the rotating EU presidency, and who donate $50 annually to Uganda, have said they’ll rescind their annual contribution should the law pass. Britain should not just call for the country to be immediately suspended from the Commonwealth, but she should follow Sweden’s lead.
Do you think it’s an act of insanity for a police officer to stop and search someone taking a photograph of a sunset? Tell that story to any reasonable person and they’ll say you made it up, but the truth is stranger than fiction. Matthew Parris recounts the story:
He [BBC photographer Jeff Overs] was there [Andrew Marr Show] to describe an attempt by the Metropolitan Police to stop him photographing a sunset over St Paul’s Cathedral. The officer had been acting, she said, under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. She’d been stopping loads of people taking pictures that afternoon “and nobody’s complained”. I mentioned that I’d been moved on from among the pigeons in Trafalgar Square when recording (into something no bigger than a Dictaphone) for a radio programme about wild animals in London. Mariella said she thought it was sinister.
I think it’s worse than sinister. It’s plumb stupid. Is there anything you could call a presiding human intelligence at work in our counter-terrorism operations? Has nobody in the Met heard of Google Street View? Do senior officers talk to junior officers about priorities, and if so, do they think it likely that al-Qaeda would use operatives carrying professional photographic equipment, rather than disguised as tourists with mobile phones? Do they think that if an officer has reason to suspect someone of taking pictures for the purposes of terrorism, the appropriate response could ever be just to tell them to stop?
For those of you eager to find out what the plods are and aren’t allowed to do as regards photographers and Section 44 have a read of this:
* If police stop and search you, the first thing you should ask is on what grounds they are conducting the search and under what powers.
* Police are able to conduct searches under a number of different pieces of legislation but they usually use either the Public Order Act, the Criminal Justice Act or under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
* Unless you are stopped while driving a car, you do NOT have to give your name or address.
* Police officers are obliged to ask for your given ethnicity. Once again, it is up to you whether you choose to answer or not.
* If police use Section 44 of the Terrorism Act they are entitled to view any images you have taken but they are NOT allowed to delete them. They can only do so with a court order.
* Under Section 58a of the Terrorism Act, police are only allowed to stop a photographer taking pictures of officers if they reasonably suspect the photos are intended to be used in connection with terrorism.
* Whether you are stopped and searched, or merely stopped and accounted for, the police officer should hand you a record of your stop.
I was on the South Bank of the Thames trying to compose a shot of the Houses of Parliament last week when two police officers stopped me.
Despite living in London for the past five years I had never photographed the Houses of Parliament before. I wish I’d never bothered. Just as I’d finished fine-tuning my first composition, two officers appeared. “Excuse me, sir,” said one. “My colleague and I would like to perform a stop-and-account on you. Don’t worry, you haven’t done anything wrong.”
For the next 10 minutes I was questioned about my evening and asked to give my height, name, address and ethnicity – all of which was recorded in a form that will now be held at the nearest police station for the next year. The form explained why I had been stopped: “Using a camera and tripod next to Westminster Bridge,” it read.
On BBC One, [Chief Constable Andy] Trotter reaffirmed that the two police officers should not have used Section 44 powers to stop Taylor. ‘It’s hard to understand why Jerome was stopped,’ he said. ‘There was no need to do a stop-and-search in that case.’
He added that it was not ‘an offence to take a photograph in a public place. ‘These powers were brought in to protect the public, not to oppress,’ Trotter told BBC One.
Trotter’s comments only reaffirmed guidelines issued by the Home Office that specifically say that photography is legal in the UK and that powers given by the Terrorism Act 2000 shouldn’t be used to prevent photographers from taking images in public.
ACPO says Section 44 was brought in to protect, not to oppress, however yet again when push comes to shove, the police (and Met in particular) do everything in their power to oppress. Matthew Parris is right later in his article when he says all the surveilling a terrorist need do can be done in complete privacy on Google Earth – it’s not just absurd to suspect numerous, clearly law-abiding photographers of terrorism, it’s just plain stupid. But hey that’s the standard of policing we have in this country. They have guidelines from the Home Office and ACPO not to behave like this, yet they persist with next to no accountability.
“We have been on hunger strike since Friday protesting about the length of time we have spent in detention here,” said Aisha, who has been in Yarl’s Wood for three months. “We have been locked in the hallway all day – five ladies have fainted because they have not eaten since Friday. No one has come to give them any medical attention.
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