The peace protestor John Catt, a 91-year-old war veteran, has just won the right for his case to be heard in the European court of human rights. He has been embroiled in a six-year legal battle, relying on the Human Rights Act to challenge police surveillance of his lawful activities and the retention of intelligence about him on the police’s domestic extremism database.
In January 2014 I discovered that during most of my career as a video journalist, I too had been monitored and that surveillance logs about me were being held on the same database, with no explanation.
Along with thousands of protestors, politicians and journalists, Catt’s case has uncovered the lengths to which the state will go to spy on its own population. And it is amid these revelations that Theresa May wants to see an end to the Human Rights Act.
During the European Union referendum, May said: “It isn’t the EU we should leave but the ECHR [European court of human rights] and the jurisdiction of its courts.” She even falsely claimed the Human Rights Act had halted a deportation because the man concerned had a pet cat.
Launching her bid to lead the Conservative party last month, she stepped back from that proposal. However, her attitude towards it remained ambivalent, to say the least. She said: “I’ve set my position on the ECHR out very clearly, but I also recognise that this is an issue that divides people, and the reality is there will be no parliamentary majority for pulling out of the ECHR, so that is something I’m not going to pursue.”
Catt’s case is Orwellian. The supreme court ruled that he is a “benign spirit” with a “clean record” for whom “violent criminality must be a very remote prospect indeed”. It ruled that the interference in his private life was justified because police said some of those attending the same protests as him were “intent on violence”, thus making it legal to put anyone attending under surveillance.
The same contradictory justification dominates New Scotland Yard’s latest defence for the police holding surveillance records on a group of journalists, including me. After more than a year the Metropolitan police have finally admitted that they still retain data on four of us. In my case, they state: “The records are retained to help UK police manage a future risk of crime – of which Jason Parkinson could be a victim.”
In all this time they haven’t told me, or any of the other journalists, who (if anyone) poses that threat to us.
The bigger picture, as my lawyer Shamik Dutta of Bhatt Murphy solicitors has pointed out, is that this broad justification could be applied to just about anyone in the country, legitimising the arbitrary surveillance of anyone on the basis that any of us could be the victim of an undefined crime, at the hands of an unidentified assailant, at any time.
The Met’s lawyers go on to state that I cannot see my up-to-date intelligence records because “an intelligence database loses all efficacy if it is not kept confidential”. This is despite the fact that 12 pages of records about my activities, spanning eight years of my life, were disclosed to me in 2014 after I made a “subject access request” to see the information held on me (a right set out in the Data Protection Act).
The Met’s justification does not explain why they needed to retain logs listing my age, ethnicity, phone numbers, home addresses, email and Twitter accounts, my movements and people I speak with on protests. It also does not explain why I have been labelled “XLW” (extreme leftwing) for simply doing my job.
Theresa May has repeatedly cited the case of Abu Qatada’s delayed deportation as reason to repeal the Human Rights Act, saying the interpretation of the law was “crazy” and calling for foreign nationals to lose their right to appeal against deportation. The truth is that the 12-year delay was the result of the British government’s failure to secure adequate assurances from Jordan about the use of torture. But in any event, why should everyone have to lose their rights because of one individual case?
For me the Human Rights Act was vital in halting police forces nationwide from routinely using “production orders” to seize all published and unpublished press coverage of incidents, effectively turning journalists into intelligence gatherers for the state. A successful high court challenge to that practice in May 2012 followed the mass trawl for hundreds of hours of broadcast footage of the brutal eviction of Dale Farm Irish travellers’ site by Essex police.
I have also relied on the Human Rights Act when I successfully challenged the Met after being obstructed on an international story outside the Greek embassy in 2008. After filming a handcuffed protestor being punched in the head by a police officer, another photographer and I were prevented from filming and removed from the area.
The Human Rights Act must be defended to protect our privacy, our freedom of speech and our right to protest. It is necessary to ensure a free press, independent of state monitoring and surveillance. It protects the freedom of journalists to question and challenge the powers that be.
