Knowing your rights as they disappear out the window

An education

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Scriptonite blog

this stuff works in the UK, but our leaders
are comparing notes, so, soon...



George Carlin at 5:00


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Police State UK: The Rights You Didn’t Know You’d Lost
Recent decades have seen a dramatic curtailing of hard won civil liberties. These restrictions have been inadvertently cushioned by the expansion of the internet and the ability to exercise some of these rights by proxy on the web. Today we look at the scale of the civil liberties confiscations.
What are Civil Liberties Anyway?
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“Civil liberties is another name for the political freedoms that we must have available to us all if it to be true to say of us that we live in a society that adheres to the principle of representative, or democratic, government.” ~ Professor Conor Gearty
These liberties can loosely be described as the right to vote, the right to life, the prohibition of torture, security of the person, the right to personal liberty and due process of law, freedom of expression and freedom of association.
In the UK they were developed through the English Charter of Liberties which extended rights to the nobility and church officials from 1100AD. Between 1213 and 1215AD groups from across England came together to draft the Magna Carta which extended a fuller group of protections and rights out to further groups. The 18th and 19th centuries saw workers movements develop to enshrine labour conditions and the rights to collective bargaining through unions and the right to strike. The first and second world wars motivated a final revolution in civil liberties including rights to healthcare, education, equal opportunities in the workplace and so on. In 1998, New Labour signed the European Convention on Human Rights into British Law with the Human Rights Act. This meant that there was legal underpinning to this bill of rights, which enshrined our civil liberties.
But before and since 1998, these rights have been eroded at a terrifying pace, particularly compared with the glacial rate at which they developed in the first place.
The ability to express our thoughts in blogs and rally in protest by hashtag may have numbed us to the reality of a bonfire of our liberties. We’ve been tweeting while Rome burned.
Personal Liberty and Due Process before the Law
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Since 1649 and the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act, citizens have been protected from false and arbitrary imprisonment and restriction of their personal liberty by the presumption of innocence until proof of their guilt is established by a jury of their peers in an independent court. Yet successive governments have passed legislation which seriously undermines this principle, and allows the state and its police force to restrict liberty and confine citizens without interference by the courts.
Detention without Charge
Prior to 1984, a person could not be held by police for longer than 24 hours without a criminal charge being made against them. The Thatcher government extended this to four days. New Labour extended this first to seven days, then to 14 days, and finally sought the power to detain citizens without charge for up to 90 days, at the request of the police. Whilst the Blair government was defeated on 90 days, the period was doubled nevertheless to 28 day. The Coalition allowed this legislation to expire in 2011, returning the period to 14 days, only to apply for permission to extend to 28 days in the same year.
Meanwhile, the Anti Terrorism and Security Act 2001 allowed for indefinite detention of non British citizens suspected of committing terrorist acts, where there was not enough evidence to proceed to a court of law.
Unlawful Imprisonment
The Control Orders passed in the Terrorism Act 2006 meant anybody suspected of terrorist related activities by the Home Secretary, but without any kind of trial, can be electronically tagged, monitored, be restricted from making phone calls, using the internet, be banned from certain kinds of work, can be restricted from going certain places, have one’s passport revoked and be under a duty to report to the police.
The current government did not extend the life of Control Orders, but replaced them with TPIMS. This saw two improvements, a two year time limit and approval of a judge required. However, a recent review of TPIMS reported that the burden of proof required to administer such an order was too low and that the extreme restrictions were neither necessary nor working.
Secret Courts
The 700 year old UK tradition of open justice has been withering on the vine with successive legislation since 1997 which allowed ‘Closed Material Proceedings’ or Secret Courts into the Justice system. First introduced in 1997 for immigration trials, they were later used for Control Order and TPIM related charges. Yet, in a stunning move this month, the Coalition government and parliament approved legislation to apply Secret Courts in civil cases. Henceforth, if a citizen takes the British government or its officials to court in cases of torture, rendition, or a whole host of other reasons, the government is able to present evidence to the judge which the claimant, defendant, media and public will never be privy to. It will allow the government to resist due scrutiny for its role in torture, rendition and other crimes. The Rev Nicholas Mercer, a lieutenant colonel who was the army’s most senior lawyer during the last Iraq war, told the Daily Mail:
“The justice and security bill has one principal aim and that is to cover up UK complicity in rendition and torture. The bill is an affront to the open justice on which this country rightly prides itself and, above all, it is an affront to human dignity.”
Freedom of Expression and Assembly
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Perhaps the most readily noticeable restrictions on our liberties to those engaged in campaign and protest, has been in the arena of Freedom of Expression and Assembly. The rise in so called ‘anti-terror’ legislation throughout the period of the New Labour government has had a massive impact on our ability to organise sizable demonstrations, marches and actions without the threat of increasing militarised police force.

Right to Protest
Thatcher’s Public Order Act 1986 sought to prevent the effectiveness of public protest (such as the Miners Strike) by making it law that in order to be lawful, protest organisers had to give police six days advance notice of their action. Since this time, successive governments have used upgrades to the Public Order Act to undermine the right to peaceful protest.
The Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 granted a number of powers to police and restrictions on protesters.
In response to the protest of Brian Haw who spoke to parliament from Parliament Square for several years as a protest against the crimes of the Iraq War, the Act applied special restrictions on protest within a designated area of 1km of any point of Parliament Square. Basically, it is now almost impossible to protest outside our parliament without being arrested.