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  Fighting Back Against Bollox Britain

From the BBC

A teenager is set to legally challenge new powers allowing police and councils to impose night-time curfews against children under-16. The 14-year-old London boy believes the powers in the Anti-Social Behaviour Act are too restrictive and are in breach of his human rights. The boy has been granted legal aid to take the case to the High Court. He plans to bring judicial review proceedings.

Police can escort anyone under-16 home who is unsupervised in a designated area after 2100 hours. Police in England and Wales have been handed the new powers. Officers have the power to escort children home from the designated areas even if they have done nothing wrong. Under the laws, which came into force in January, 150 areas have been designated.

The 14 year-old mounting legal action is from Richmond-upon-Thames, where a curfew is in force around the town centre and riverbank. The teenager's lawyers, who are backed by campaign group Liberty, claim that the measures prevent the youngster from taking part in social activities - such as evening visits to the cinema.

They argue that the law infringes the boy's right to respect for a private life and to associate with others. The lawyers also say that the measures discriminate against all people aged under-16.

  Governmental Respect for Law has Emigrated

It sometimes seems that we have as many law breaking officials abusing their powers as we have law breaking individuals supposedly being targeted. We could therefore halve the crime rate in Britain merely by requiring our enforcement officers to obey the law in their official capacity.

From The Register

As the UK Home Office has stressed on numerous occasions, police will not be given powers to demand ID papers from you as and when a national identity card is introduced. The Home Office has not however shouted quite so loudly about the fact that the Immigration and Nationalities Directorate (IND) has these powers already, and has been busily using them since at least May 2003.

"Operation Collegiate" was mounted in early August at Harrow and Wealdstone station by the Immigration Service and British Transport Police in conjunction with train operator Silverlink. "Suspected fare dodgers were approached by police officers and their names checked against databases on handheld computers to see if they were illegal immigrants or were wanted for other offences." This, incidentally, suggests we have a trawl within a trawl, as it is not part of the usual business of Transport Police to operate as ticket inspectors. As the Free Press tells us, however: "A BTP spokesman said that many criminals also avoid paying their fares on public transport."

So we can see the ability to check ID against databases via handheld terminals as yielding multi-level synergies to this kind of operation. 'Reasonably suspicious' immigration officers can demand your papers, transport police suspecting fare dodging can throw up immigration irregularities and a range of other wanted criminals, and ticket inspectors can trigger intervention by either or both of the other two. Even discounting the Bucks Free Press' apparent suggestion that changing platforms constitutes "acting suspiciously," there seems to be plenty of scope for demanding ID here.

As we reported earlier, however, such joint immigration-police operations have included a "walk up" at identified locations, including "car washes and other similar activity". Which is another example of checking ID in areas where immigration officers might have reasonable grounds for suspecting people who look and/or sound foreign.

From the Evening Standard

Immigration officers are questioning Tube travellers because they sound "foreign", the Evening Standard has learned.

Thousands of passengers are being stopped in a secret operation using tactics the police are specifically forbidden from deploying. Immigration officers are stopping anyone they consider to look or sound foreign and asking them to produce their papers to prove their right to British residence.

Their aim is uncover illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers. The discovery that these tactics are being used prompted a political row today. The Liberal Democrats are set to write to the Home Secretary demanding an explanation for a scheme civil rights groups dubbed "Stalinist".

The existence of the spot-check operation has been kept secret by the Home Office but an Evening Standard investigation discovered that teams of immigration officers have been carrying out the procedures since May 2003.

It is part of a wider programme in which 1,000 suspected illegal immigrants have been detained. During one operation witnessed by the Evening Standard, a series of people getting off Tube trains were stopped by immigration officers dressed in body armour and carrying handcuffs.

The officer in charge said people were picked out for questioning if they sounded foreign. One immigration officer said: If you hear someone speaking a language that's not European we approach them and ask 'do you mind if I ask you what nationality you are?' If they get upset or start acting suspiciously we ask the police to assist and demand identification.

Onlookers said they were shocked when they saw the operation at Harrow-on-the-Hill station shortly before the evening rush hour. Ellen Cook, 23, an admin assistant, said: They are assuming if people look different they should be harassed. It's despicable.

Today the Home Office faced a barrage of criticism over the tactics. Police are specifically forbidden by Home Office guidelines from stopping people because of their accent or appearance.

A junior Home Office minister promised an investigation when official figures showed a massive jump in the number of Muslims stopped by police under anti-terrorist laws. Blunkett now faces demands for an explanation of his secret initiative.

Mark Oaten, home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, told the Evening Standard he was writing to Blunkett to demand answers. This is a step too far, The Home Secretary should urgently review powers that allow immigration officers to indiscriminately stop people in this way.

Barry Hugill, of the civil rights group Liberty, said: Stopping people and checking their papers is what we used to associate with the old communist states. It's real stab-in-the-dark stuff. It is not intelligence-led, it's 'lets see what we can get today'.

Keith Best, chief executive of the Immigration Advisory Service, said: It is a time-consuming and costly way of ending up with just a few people arrested by circumstance. It's a rather random blunderbuss approach that offends many ordinary decent citizens, some of whom will be third or fourth generation British."

The Home Office said it had no figures for how many illegal immigrants had been caught in the sweeps of Tube stations. British Transport police officers are taken away from regular patrol duties to back up the immigration officers.

Today the Home Office defended the policy.

A spokesman said:The Government has made it clear it will take a robust stance against those who abuse UK laws. We will prosecute and will seek to remove those who have no legal basis of stay in the UK. (So shouldn't the Home Office prosecute their immigration officers for abusing their powers and stopping people without the required  reasonable suspicion)

  Britain Condones Torture

Based on an article from The Guardian

Appeal court judges yesterday defied human decency by ruling that British courts could use evidence extracted under torture, as long as British agents were not complicit in the abuse.

In a highly controversial judgment, the second highest court in the land rejected the appeals of 10 men suspected of having links to international terrorism and currently held without charge in what activists call "Britain's Guantánamo Bay".

The court of appeal, sitting in London, ruled that the home secretary was right to hold the men in two high- security prisons and a high- security psychiatric hospital, and that the special immigration appeal commission (Siac), which backed the internments, was justified in doing so.

Two of the men have since returned to their countries of origin but are still appealing.

The judgment was immediately condemned as leaving the door open for torture evidence to be used in British courts - and the detainees plan to take their appeal to the House of Lords.

Last night Amnesty International criticised the judges for giving a "green light for torture". It said: The rule of law and human rights have become casualties of the measures taken in the aftermath of September 11. This judgment is an aberration, morally and legally.

The decision comes just a week after three British men formerly held in Guantánamo Bay described how after ill treatment they had confessed to meeting up with Osama bin Laden when in fact all three had alibis, confirmed by British security services, that they were in the UK at the time.

Ellie Smith, a human rights lawyer at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, said: It is really dangerous and very worrying that any court is willing to use any evidence that has been obtained through use of torture or ill treatment.

The decision to allow evidence from foreign torture was tantamount to contracting out the torture. We have seen recent instances where the US forces have sent people to other countries for the purpose of extracting evidence, she added.

The men - all of them foreign nationals and Muslim - are detained indefinitely under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 and do not know most of the evidence against them because it is kept secret in the interests of national security.

In their appeals, they argued that to use evidence obtained by torture was "morally repugnant", adding that evidence may have been extracted from men detained in both Guantánamo Bay and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

Yesterday, one of the judges, Lord Justice Laws, ruled that there was no evidence to suggest the secretary of state had relied on material derived from torture or any other violation of the European convention on human rights. To suggest that it had been was "purely hypothetical". He and Lord Justice Pill said that torture evidence could be used in a British court so long as the state had not itself "procured" it or "connived" at it.

The position facing the secretary of state on the use of such evidence was "extremely problematic". The law could not expect the secretary of state to inquire into the methods of how information was obtained.

Justice Laws said: He [the home secretary] may be presented with information of great potential importance, where there is, let us say, a suspicion as to the means by which, in another jurisdiction, it has been obtained? What is he to do?

The judges unanimously dismissed the appeal but Lord Justice Neuberger dissented on the torture issue. He said he did not consider that a person would have a fair trial if evidence obtained through maltreatment was to be used, particularly since the person giving the statement would not be available for cross-examination.

The majority decision was welcomed by the shameful home secretary, David Blunkett. He said: There has been a great deal of speculation about the cases put before Siac and whether they relied upon torture. Let me make it clear, we unreservedly condemn the use of torture and have worked hard with our international partners to eradicate this practice. BUT, it would be irresponsible not to take appropriate account of any information that could help protect national security and public safety.

Gareth Peirce, solicitor for eight of the men, said: This is a terrifying judgment. It shows we have completely lost our way in this country, morally and legally.

Britain is a signatory to the European convention on human rights which enshrines a series of fundamental rights, including "freedom from torture, inhuman and degrading treatment".

Facilitating torture elsewhere is also illegal under the convention against torture to which the UK is committed.

The lawyer for two other men, Natalia Garcia, said that human rights had become "a casualty of the so-called war on terror. We have sunk to an all-time low where a court can even contemplate that evidence obtained under torture could be admissible and where there is no attempt to provide any effective remedy against abuse of power. This is injustice heaped upon injustice and we shall appeal to the House of Lords.

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