Yet again, it looks like a climate of fear and abuse of the Terrorism Act have have lead to an innocent man being imprisoned for six days (via The Guardian).
To summarise, an asian student downloads the Al Qaida training manual for research on his post-graduate course from a US government web site, and it is discovered on his administrators PC. The Nottingham University staff report it’s existence to the police, who promptly arrest him and keep him detained for six days.
Eventually he was released without charge. Many countries don’t allow people to be held for more than a few days without charge at most, because everyone should have the right to a quick and fair trial. The police can hold you for 28 days (and the government wants to extend that to 56) under the Terrorism Act. Imagine being locked up for 6 days, let alone 28, with no charge, nothing to answer to and no way to appeal.
Locking someone up for a month would ruin their life. Imagine trying to explain that to your employer (assuming you still have a job at the end of it), or your family and friends. Of course it’s fine if charges are brought and a trial is arranged in good time, but in cases like this there does not have to be.
Of course, people argue that it’s okay because only “terrorists” (by which I think they probably mean Muslims) are being targeted by police, but that isn’t the case. The Terrorism Act has been repeatedly and widely abused. Councils use it to spy on parents trying to get in to good schools or people dropping litter. A woman was arrested for walking along a cycle path under it:
Sally Cameron was arrested under the Terrorism Act and held for four hours for walking along a cycle path in Dundee. She said: “I’ve been walking to work every morning for months and months to keep fit. One day, I was told by a guard on the gate that I couldn’t use the route any more because it was solely a cycle path and he said, if I was caught doing it again, I’d be arrested…The next thing I knew, the harbour master had driven up behind me with a megaphone, saying, ‘You’re trespassing, please turn back’. It was totally ridiculous. I started laughing and kept on walking. Cyclists going past were also laughing…But then two police cars roared up beside me and cut me off, like a scene from Starsky and Hutch, and officers told me I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act. The harbour master was waffling on and (saying that), because of September 11, I would be arrested and charged.”
This really is the fundamental problem with all these kinds of laws and technical advances (such as CCTV and portable x-ray scanners): they are wide open to abuse, and much as everyone would like to trust the police it’s clear that we can’t. If you look at the number of abuses of power over the years, the number of wrongful convictions based on the police falsifying evidence, the number of people whose lives have been ruined by this kind of thing, it becomes clear that police powers need to be limited.
This sort of thing also brings up the issue of pre-crime. Reading about Al Qaida should not, in itself, be a crime. Even reading terrorist training manuals does not make you an actual terrorist, in the same way that reading a book on poker strategies does not make you a gambler, or watching The Bill does not make you a cop. There is clearly a difference between being interested in something, even if it’s something people are afraid of or which could be used to cause harm, and actually causing harm to someone. In this case, it’s clearly pre-crime – actual Al Qaida terrorists don’t need to read up about Al Qaida. Sure, maybe it could influence someone’s decision to join Al Qaida, but so could news reports on Iraq or September 11th. Either it’s pre-emptive crime prevention or it’s thought crime.
It’s not just people researching Al Qaida either. In July 2005, a cricketer on his way to a match was stopped at King’s Cross station in London under Section 44 powers and questioned over his possession of a bat. The Torygraph (I know) has lots more examples.