SERIOUS TERRORIST OFFENCES - EXCUSE ME?

10 February 2010  Richard Haley  Full article can be read HERE.

      Mohammed Atif Siddique, who walked free on Tuesday after the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction under Section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000, has been described as a "stupid young man." Stupidity at the age of 20 isn't a very serious flaw. Dunder-headedness on the part of Scotland's police and prosecutors is a lot more worrying. But what else can you call their doggy, excitable, unthinking pursuit of Atif Siddique?

      Their dunder-headedness was combined with a smart-Alec approach to the law. What else can you call the decision by the police to delay Atif Siddique's arrest until 13 April 2006, the very day that the controversial Terrorism Act 2006 came into force? That allowed them to add an extra item – encouraging terrorism – to the charge-sheet, in case the other charges wouldn't stick. The device was successful and the conviction for this essentially frivolous charge still stands, even though Atif Siddique has now been cleared of the main charge against him.

    All this might be amusing if it hadn't cost Atif Siddique nearly four years of his life and the stigma of a couple of terrorism convictions. It might be amusing if it wasn't eerily reminiscent of the Bush regime's over-wrought, pig-headed manoeuvres to incorporate torture into official US policy, or Blair's "now it's legal, now it isn't but it doesn't matter" approach to the war in Iraq.

     Counsel for the Crown said at Tuesday's appeal court hearing "Mohammed Siddique remains convicted of serious terrorist offences." It would have been more accurate to say "Mohammed Atif Siddique remains convicted on frivolous terrorism charges that should never have been put before a court."

      One of these charges is the smart-Alec charge under the Terrorism Act 2006, a law that Atif Siddique broke for less than a day. Perhaps he would have closed the offending website down before the new law came into force if he hadn't been distracted as a result of having been stopped by police a week earlier. As it was, he probably didn't even notice the new law. Who can blame him?

ann arky's home.

    

WAR = BIG BUSINESS.

   While the various governments make belly rumbling noises about climate change and carbon footprints, continually telling us how they are trying to save the planet by giving you cheap roof insulation etc. and at the same time asking you to turn your thermostat down one degree, only boil enough water for one cup of tea, and walk or cycle to work. What they never discuss is the carbon footprint of war. War is probably the highest carbon footprint of any human activity. However it is a policy of keep quiet about that one. War is big business, war helps the economy, war creates jobs, war puts billions of tax payers money into the coffers of  big business, war is the state's biggest business. Think of the waste of transporting and maintaining thousands of personnel half way across the globe, armed to the teeth and continually exploding millions of tons of armaments and replacing them, at the same time destroying the infrastructure of some poor country and in the process killing thousands of innocent, old and young people. While in the same breath, saying we can't afford care for the elderly, nursery places for the young and affordable housing for all.

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CORPORATISM/FASCISM.

     The British government's decision to sell off the search and rescue facilities is another step towards a totally corporate run country. The corporate world has already made inroads into the health service and education among other aspects of the social structure of this country. This latest hand over of public assets to the corporate world could have very far reaching consequences. I can see the day when you had better not take to the hills or go for a sail without your credit card. Rest assured that the corporate world are not doing this for humane reasons. How can you morally make money out of somebody in a life threatening situation? If you are ever lost or injured in a blizzard on the Scottish hills, perhaps your credit rating will decide whether they send a helicopter or a dog sleigh team. After all, business is business.

    The march of corporatism is the march to fascism, it was Mussolini who said, that it should not be called fascism but corporatism as it was the coming together of the state and the corporate world. Who should know better what fascism is than the man himself, Mussolini. The more we tolerate this march of corporatism the harder it will be to have any control over our lives. We should be organising against that cancer in our society, the growth of corporatism. Society belongs to those in that society, not to a faceless bunch of corporate parasites. Only a mass grass roots movement can ever hope to halt the growth of this cancer.

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Does wealth trickle down?

What is your opinion of the capitalist "trickle down theory"???

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CRISIS/OPPORTUNITY???

     The present time is probably the greatest opportunity we have ever had of bring about the demise of the capitalist system. The capitalist world is in crisis, the claims of recovery are not really believed by the big money. They see countries that are carrying massive debts that they can’t service and see the spectre of sovereign debt defaults. That debt of course is tax payers' money that went to "bail-out" the financial parasites of the capitalist world. The so called stimulus hasn’t worked, "The real concern is that the whole recovery is nothing more than poorly-directed government stimulus which has simply had the effect of boosting asset prices," according to David Morrison at GFT.

   The big money club’s answer to the problem is to force countries to start a prolonged and vicious series of cuts in social spending, education, health, benefits, etc. allied to tax increases that will fall mainly on the average to poor section of society. This will be accompanied by selling of off the country’s assets to the private sector, at bargain prices of course.

   This is where we come in, the governments of these debt laden countries will have to legislate these events into being. We will be the ones that will suffer, not the chief executives nor the government ministers. We have to start now and organise and take to the streets demanding an end to any idea of cuts on our standard of living. Not in this city and that city, but across the country and in each country.

   The European countries most at risk of defaulting on their debt are Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland with Britain bringing up the rear. Portugal has already managed to stop the government from implementing its proposed cuts and Greece will probably have massive resistance on the streets as that government tries to please its money master in the financial world.

    Without a successful and massive attack on our living conditions the capitalist system will fracture and start to fall apart. If we want to change the world to one of justice and mutual aid, seeing to the needs of all our people, then we have to prevent this savage onslaught on our conditions. Communicate across borders, organise across borders, act across borders. To the working class there are no borders, we are all at the receiving end of this attack by the parasite class as they struggle to hold onto their power and privileges.

 

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FROM THE PARIS COMMUNE TO THE KRONSTADT REBELLION

Remember now there were others before this;
Now when the unwanted hours rise up,
And the sun rises red in unknown quarters,
And the constellations change places,
And cloudless thunder erases the furrows,
And moonlight stains and the stars grow hot.
Though the air is fetid, conscripted fathers,
With the black bloat of your dead faces;
Though men wander idling out of factories
Where turbine and hand are both freezing;
And the air clears at last above the chimneys;
Though mattresses curtain the windows;
And every hour hears the snarl of explosion;
Yet one shall rise up alone saying:
“I am one out of many, I have heard
Voices high in the air crying out commands;
Seen men’s bodies burst into torches;
Seen faun and maiden die in the night air raids;
Heard the watchwords exchanged in the alleys;
Felt hate speed the blood stream and fear curl the nerves.
I know too the last heavy maggot;
And know the trapped vertigo of impotence.
I have traveled prone and unwilling
In the dense processions through the shaken streets.
Shall we hang thus by taut navel strings
To this corrupt placenta till we’re flyblown;
Till our skulls are cracked by crow and kite
And our members become the business of ants,
Our teeth the collection of magpies?”
They shall rise up heroes, there will be many,
None will prevail against them at last.
They go saying each: “I am one of many”;
Their hands empty save for history.
They die at bridges, bridge gates, and drawbridges.
Remember now there were others before;
The sepulchres are full at ford and bridgehead.
There will be children with flowers there,
And lambs and golden-eyed lions there,
And people remembering in the future.
Kenneth Rexroth.  December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982

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Support Mohammed Atif Siddique

*** Support Mohammed Atif Siddique in court on Tuesday *** SACC meeting Tue evening - Doors Open, From Plantation to Pollok, From Kabul to Kennishead

    Mohammed Atif Siddique - Appeal Court Hearing on Tuesday 9 February 10am High Court, Lawnmarket (Royal Mile), Edinburgh - map

Assemble outside the court from 9.00am Support for Mohammed Atif Siddique welcome outside and inside the court (please show respect and courtesy to the court).

Getting there

   Mohammed Atif Siddique will appear before the Appeal Court again on TUESDAY, following a decision on 29 January that he had suffered a miscarriage of justice when he was convicted for "terrorism" in September 2007. He'll find out then whether the Crown is seeking to bring a fresh prosecution. Atif's friends and supporters fear that Crown lawyers, incredibly, may try to do just that. If they do, Atif's legal team will no doubt be arguing robustly that no new prosecution should be allowed.

Atif Siddique has already served nearly four years of his 8-year sentence (which runs from the date of his arrest, in recognition of the long delay before his case came to court). His original trial lasted 4 weeks. Any fresh prosecution would be an outrage, piling further anguish on top of the miscarriage of justice that the Appeal Court says Atif Siddique has already suffered. The Appeal Court said at the end of last month that it was "minded" to quash Atif's conviction. It should do that. 

* Please come along to show your support from 9.00am (for 10am), even if you can only spare 10 or 15 minutes.

* Better still, please set aside the morning or the day so that you can show your support for Atif through any legal arguments that develop, and so that you are there if, finally, he walks free.

A packed court makes a difference. Please pack the court for Mohammed Atif Siddique.

For more information, contact Richard 07719822164 or email contact@saccnet.org.uk

Background

   The Appeal Court in Edinburgh ruled on 29 January that Mohammed Atif Siddique, jailed for eight years for "terrorism" offences, had suffered a "miscarriage of justice" and that it was "minded to quash" his conviction.

    Mohammed Atif Siddique was arrested at his family home in Alva, Clackmannanshire in April 2006. His case came to trial in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Glasgow airport. Atif was convicted in September 2007 and subsequently sentenced to 8 years in prison.

    Speaking on the steps of Glasgow High Court after Atif's conviction, his solicitor Aamer Anwar said:

"Today Mohammed Atif Siddique was found guilty of doing what millions of young people do every day, looking for answers on the internet. This verdict is a tragedy for justice and for freedom of speech. It undermines the values that separate us from the terrorist, the very values we should be fighting to protect."

In a case that made legal history, Aamer Anwar was charged with contempt of court as a result of his remarks. The case against Aamer Anwar was heard by three judges sitting in the High Court of Justiciary, Edinburgh in April 2008. A judgement clearing him of contempt was given on 1 July 2008.

   Mohammed Atif Siddique 's appeal was heard in Edinburgh in July 2009. Donald Findlay QC, for Mohammed Atif Siddique, and Derek Ogg QC, for the Crown both described Section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000 as "draconian." Derek Ogg QC also described it as "controversial" and "unusual."

Appeal Court ruling - SACC report, 29 Jan 2010

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WHY DESTROY CCTV CAMERAS ?

I came across this and thought it was worth discussing. Taken from SCHNEWS.

1.1) Why destroy cctv cameras ?

    Trust your instincts, but if you need intellectual justification then:

"The gaze of the cameras does not fall equally on all users of the street but on those who are stereotypical predefined as potentially deviant, or through appearance and demeanour, are singled out by operators as unrespectable. In this way youth, particularly those already socially and economically marginal, may be subject to even greater levels of authoritative intervention and official stigmatisation, and rather than contributing to social justice through the reduction of victimisation, CCTV will merely become a tool of injustice through the amplification of differential and discriminatory policing."

   "an instrument of social control and the production of discipline; the production of 'anticipatory conformity'; the certainty of rapid deployment to observed deviance and; the compilation of individualised dossiers of the monitored population."

"The unforgiving Eye: CCTV surveillance in public space" Dr Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at Hull University, UK.

"What we have been able to show is that Creduce crime - if anything it has increased - and it didn't reduce fear of crime. If anything there was a slight increase in anxiety."CTV didn't 

Prof Jason Ditton of Sheffield University.

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WHY I HATE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA!!

    If it was just the sex, scandal and celebrity worship it would be bad enough but the mainstream media is much worse than just a keyhole view of the self-centred celebrity parasites and their fawning poodles. It has a much more sinister purpose, it is a necessary tool of the state/corporate/imperialism military machine and is used with a relentless brutal ruthlessness.

    Mainstream media, like harmful bacteria, is everywhere, it is accepted in its present form as if it were the guardian of society. It probably is, the guardian of this corrupt and vicious system we call capitalism. It does this by concealing and safe-guarding the shady and self-serving connections between the media, politics, government, big business, in particular, the military-industrial complex and religious organisations.

   To do this the planet and most of its inhabitants, you and me, are ruthlessly lied to, manipulated and exploited, sometimes tortured and killed, for the enrichment and gratification of a few power freaks and parasites. The mainstream media spouts patriotism, dividing the world’s working class, perpetuates such schemes as the states phony "War on terror", glorifies the present slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere as some sort of Western sacrifice for the benefit of others and works up fervour against the next sacrificial lamb, in the present case, Iran.

   The mainstream media will claim to inform and investigate when in fact all it does is pump out money making distraction or disinformation at best and at worst, cynical war-mongering propaganda. It will lie and distort with impunity, overlook, deny or " forget" its own dangerous filth but will not hesitate to crucify one of its enemies for the slightest slip-up.

   To be informed we need to ignore the mainstream media and create our own media, a working class information system that is not tied to the profit greed machine, not wedded to the corrupt state apparatus. This is easier than ever with desktop publishing and the internet, through these channels we can produce local news handouts as well as keeping ourselves informed on international affairs. We can create links across all borders with our working class brothers and sisters in any part of the world, we can create unity within our class and lay the foundations for a just and peaceful world based on sustainability and mutual aid. Let’s communicate, organise, take back our world and let the revolution flourish.

 

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Could be one less to worry about??

Where are all the bounty hunters, now is your chance to earn some spare cash and at the same time take a dangerous man off the streets and out of circulation.
http://www.arrestblair.org/   

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PROTECT MEDICAL CONFIDENTIALITY NOW

     Some of you will remember the fight to provide patients with rights over the NHS Summary Care Records back in 2006-7. Though the vast majority of GPs and the public opposed the uploading of patients' information without explicit consent, the Department of Health pushed on regardless, uploading the details of anyone* who failed to respond to a single letter. Now the Department is bribing health authorities across the UK to do a massive mailshot to patients. Fail to respond to a single letter and your personal details - including sensitive medical information, such as your last 6 months' prescriptions - will be permanently uploaded to the NHS spine.

    We'd like to know when and where these mailshots are going, as we suspect that the Department of Health is still trying to pull a fast one. If you receive one of the mailshots, which should contain a leaflet entitled 'Changes to your health records', and it DOESN'T contain a copy of the opt out form then please get in touch with us via office@no2id.net

    Latest info indicates that mailshots could already be going out to parts of London and the East of England, with health authorities in the North West, North East, and Yorkshire and Humber to follow in coming weeks. It would be helpful if you could indicate the region in which you live when you contact the office. --

*Anyone, that is, who had not already got their GP to put a 'stop code' on their medical record using the NHS Confidentiality Campaign's opt out letter - which you can still send, if you haven't done so already:

http://www.nhsconfidentiality.org/optoutletter


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I WANT TO BELIEVE!

I WANT TO BELIEVE!

I want to believe

All that is good is out there

Sleeping in hearts that live in dark valleys,

About to blossom like some magic woodland,

In spite of war, in spite of greed

The essence that is humanity struggling to be free.

All around death arrives in many guises,

Silent as the frost poverty kills,

The ruthless march of war

With every drum beat seeks God’s blessing,

While the God fearing kill the God fearing,

Slaughter in the name of the greater good.

I want to believe

All that is good is out there

Sleeping in the hearts that live in dark valleys

About to blossom like some magic woodland,

Not just as the dream of poets.

 

ann arky's home.

" A DEVIOUS PLAN"??

   The British state in conjuction wth a load of others has decided on a grand plan to get out of Afghanistan and claim a victory. As Boldrick would say, "They have a devious plan." They are going to give that honest broker President Karzai a pot of gold, £87 million to shell out to young "low level" Taliban. The deal will be come and get a job with us and we will give some of the slush fund. I wonder what the average British and American soldier will think when this young "low level" Taliban who was responsible for killing, let's say, two Americans and one British soldier is offered a pot of gold to come into their camp and do the odd job, or perhaps get his college fees paid, courtesy of the US and British governemnts. Ah, but we all know that is the way the state works, your life is just a bargaining chip in their grand plan of things. Busines is business as the say.

FOREIGN POLICY.

Listless eyes, lifeless face

motionless body with hanging limbs

carried by a mother fleeing

foreign policy’s vicious whims.

No toys, no laughter

no playing in the sun,

a short pitiful life;

an Afghan child, 2001.

No plans, no choices

no hope by any name,

collateral damage

in the big players game.

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WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR COMMONS?

http://www.scottishcommons.org/

     They were stolen. Here is what Professor Cosmo Innes (1798-1874), the famous advocate and Professor of Constitutional Law and History in this Department wrote in his book, Scotch Legal Antiquities: - “Looking over our country, the land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable - the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated and held by charter - is a narrow strip on the river bank or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving. hey were not thought of when charters were made and lands feudalised. Now as cultivation increased, the tendency in the agricultural mind was to occupy these wide commons, and our lawyers lent themselves to appropriate the poor man’s grazing to the neighbouring baron. They pointed to his charter with its clause of parts and pertinents, with its general clause of mosses and moors - clauses taken from the style book, not with any reference to the territory conveyed in that charter; and although the charter was hundreds of years old, and the lord had never possessed any of the common, when it cam to be divided, the lord got the whole that was allocated to the estate, and the poor cottar none. The poor had no lawyers.”

   Now here in the 21st. century they are still at it, selling off and stealing the peoples' common goods. Do we need lawyers to take back what was stolen from us???

 

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REJOICE, THE RECESSION IS OVER!!!!

       We are all supposed to rejoice at the news that the recession is officially over. Of course unemployment will continue to rise as the corporate world streamlines for what it sees as “difficult” times ahead. The mountain sized bailout is still there, it still has to be paid for and that’s where you and I come in, we are expected to pay for it. The main political parties are arguing over just where to cut and by how much. Rest assured that there will be massive cuts in social spending, that translates into cut benefits and less jobs.

      We can accept this attack on our living standards by meekly holding out the begging bowl and pleading for some lousy job with no security and crap wages, so as to ensure that the privileged parasites can get their greed feast going in full gear once more. Or we can take what is rightfully ours, everything we produce. We the ordinary people built everything on the planet, we mined every piece of ore, we smelted every piece of metal, we made every piece of machinery. We grew every oat, apple, potato and banana and we transported them across the globe. It is our world, we have earned it by sweat and blood through generations, it doesn’t belong to the parasites. It’s time to take it all back rather than crawl for a hand-out from those parasites who produce nothing but power and privilege for their own class at our expense.

    In stead of protests and strikes we could start with more occupations, more of locking the bosses out, more taking what is ours and more control of our lives. The first step is collective seizure/management of workplaces, but the next step has to be to dismantle the relationships between the various enterprises, radically transforming them to be part of the community. The inherent relationship in the way capitalism and industry have set things up has an inbuilt value structure that must be destroyed, otherwise workers' self-management could function simply as a form of emergency management of failing capitalist enterprises, to be once more engulf in the capitalist value structure in a renewed and invigorated capitalism. The goal is for collective democratic management tied into the community and working in federation and solidarity with other like projects with the aim of expanding, depriving capitalism of its necessary growth and consumers. The bigger the capitalist crisis, the greater our opportunity to recreate society in the shape we desire.

 

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WORKERS, KNOW YOUR HISTORY.

   

    In a quiet cemetery in Abercrombie Street in the East End of Glasgow, you’ll find the memorial in the photograph above. It was raised to the memory of the six weavers shot in 1787 by the military at Drygate near Glasgow Cathedral. Their crime? They were part of a protest march making its way to the Cathedral in support of a wage increase. Then, as of now, the city officials, the military and the judiciary put 100% support behind the employers. They had no hesitation in using what ever power they had at their disposal.

     In this type of society nothing changes. The harshest of treatment is still handed out to strikers and protesters while the employers are protected by the powers of the state. If we jump forward a couple of hundred years to the 1980’s they were still at it with the brutal and harshest of treatment handed out to the striking miners during the Thatcher era.

   This is what they call democracy, a system where the employers can exploit the workers with the protection of all the power of the state but a demand for a decent living can be met with all the force of the state.

    Today’s struggles are linked to all those struggles of the past and we should learn the lessons. It is the workers against the state and the employers. They fight to keep their privileges and power, while we struggle to get a decent living. The two are incompatible it is either their privilege at our expense, or a decent living for all with the end to the power and privilege of the parasites.

 

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ATTEMPT TO BAN PROTEST OUTSIDE BLAIR INQUIRY

       Negotiations between the police and Stop the War broke down today when it became clear that the government is trying to hide our legitimate peaceful protest from Tony Blair when he gives evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Friday. After days in which we were told by the police that they would try to facilitate our protest, Stop the War has been told we will not be allowed to protest on the grass outside the QEII Conference Centre. This is a denial of our democratic rights and Stop the War will now call for the widest possible mobilisation, not just to express the majority view in this country that Tony Blair should be held to account for war crimes, but in defence of  the right to protest.

      Why should the public be denied the right to peaceful protest, particularly when the latest evidence given to the Chilcot Committee shows beyond doubt that Tony Blair knew he was taking Britain into an illegal war, and that he doctored legal advice to deceive his Cabinet, Parliament and the British public.

     Stop the War is calling on all its supporters, local groups and affiliated organisations to mobilise the widest possible support for the Blair protest on Friday. We urge everyone who can to join the demonstration at the QEII Conference Centre from 8am. Full details for the planned events are here: http://bit.ly/8mKM0T

Spread the word as widely as you can among your family, friends, work colleagues, fellow students etc, etc

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Some Democracy???

      The politicians and the media always spout that we live in a democracy yet the shallowest look at the structure of our society makes it blindingly obvious that this is the big lie. Politicians are an elite, drawn from the minority group, the middle or upper class. All that is presented to us on a political level from politicians and the media is controlled and represented by the middle class and on the odd occasion, the upper class.        When, on the odd occasion, a working class person becomes an MP, they must convert to middle class behaviour. Working class individuals who join the political/media parasite club and don’t modify their accents and mannerism to conform to that of the middle/upper class, are ridiculed. In the recent BBC’s “Question Time”, January 14, Ken Clarke stated that class was no longer an issue in Britain. This was said without a smile or a giggle, in spite of the fact the he and the other three members of the panel and the chairman were all from that small privileged group of 7%, the “public school boys” and no doubt part of the old boys network.

      How can they claim it is a democracy when the vast majority of the top civil servants, (70%) are also drawn from the small 7% of the population that are public school privileged. These are the people that advise the middle class club that is our government of the day, on policies. Are they likely to come up with any policies that will damage their privileged position in society? As a group they are completely out of touch with the ordinary working class people of this country and can never really understand the problems and conditions faced by the working class. They will always legislate to make sure that the privileged class of parasites that they belong to will stay in that position at the expense of the majority. In this society wealth buys privilege and power, that allows you to put your kids into that small elite 7% of public school educated individuals who go on to safeguard the privileges of their class by filling all the top positions in the political and media field. Under these conditions it is impossible to have a democracy.

 

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Timeless comment.

Some things are timeless and Hicks is as relevant today as he was when alive, just enjoy, a giggle never does any harm.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkZQ2Fx1j9E  

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Section 44 must go, says SACC

     Scotland Against Criminalising Communities (SACC) welcomes Tuesday's ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that Stop and Search powers under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 breach Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to respect for a private life). SACC says that Section 44 of the Terrorism Act should now be repealed.

   The judgement concerned a case brought by Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton, who were stopped by police while their way to a demonstration at an arms fair held in London in September 2003. However, the judgement was framed in very general terms and it seems almost certain that any use at all of Section 44 stop and search powers would be similarly in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

   Section 44 allows police to search people for items that could be used in connection with terrorism, without needing to have any reasonable grounds for suspicion. The searches can only be carried out in areas where authorisation for them has been granted. Most people are unlikely to know whether a particular place is in such an area or not, and police and the Government are secretive about these authorisations. The Strasbourg judges ruled that the stop and search power itself and the authorisation process "are neither sufficiently circumscribed nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse."

    SACC has long argued that Section 44 stop and searches are unjust and arbitrary. We are glad that the European Court agrees with us. Any police force that continues to search people under Section 44 will be skating on very thin legal ice indeed. There is no need for arbitrary stop and search powers of this sort. Where police have reasonable suspicions about someone they have perfectly adequate search powers without relying on Section 44.

     Parliament should act urgently to clear up this mess by repealing Section 44. It needs to respect both the letter and the spirit of the Strasbourg ruling. MPs need to resist any Government attempt to re-bake Section 44 in a rights-proof form. When the Law Lords outlawed the arbitrary powers of detention contained in the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, the Government devised its bizarre control orders scheme in order to evade the ruling. This obstinacy lead to a catalogue of injustice and litigation. We don't want that to be repeated. We need a clean break. We need Section 44 to go.

     116 section 44 stop and searches were carried out by Scotland's regional police forces in 2007, 1376 were carried out in 2008 and 878 from 1 January to 31 August 2009, according to a statement made last September by justice minister Kenny MacAskill. The number of section 44 stop and searches carried out by British Transport Police in Scotland is unknown. 117,278 section 44 stop and searches were carried out in England and Wales in the year 2007/8.

      Section 44 stop and searches haven't prevented a single act of terrorism. All they have done is signal to Muslims they are the target of police suspicion (since they are disproportionately likely to be searched), signal to other communities that Muslims are to be regarded as suspicious (since they are observed being searched), and to promote amongst everyone an exaggerated fear of terrorism.

      SACC will continue to campaign for the repeal not only of Section 44 but of the whole of the Terrorism Act 2000, which manufactures injustice and fear in many other ways besides those considered in the Strasbourg ruling.

Notes
1. The Strasbourg ruling in the case of Gillan and Quinton v. the United Kingdom, can be read in full at http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=html&documentId=860909&portal=hbkm&source=externalbydocnumber

2. Figures for Section 44 Stop and Search in Scotland can be found at http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/Apps2/Business/PQA/default.aspx?pq=S3W-26459

3. More about stop and search in Scotland at http://www.sacc.org.uk/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=422&catid=44

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