Europe rights court rules UK suspicionless searches illegal

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Europe rights court rules UK suspicionless searches illegal

January 13, 2010 07:30:00 am

[JURIST] The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) [official website] ruled [judgment text; press release] Tuesday that searches performed by police without legitimate suspicion are illegal. The ECHR found that British police had violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights [text, PDF] when they stopped and searched two individuals in 2003 under the Terrorism Act 2000 [text]. Under Article 8, everyone is entitled to the right of respect for private and family life. The court found:

[T]he use of the coercive powers conferred by the legislation to require an individual to submit to a detailed search of his person, his clothing and his personal belongings amounts to a clear interference with the right to respect for private life. Although the search is undertaken in a public place, this does not mean that Article 8 is inapplicable. Indeed, in the Court's view, the public nature of the search may, in certain cases, compound the seriousness of the interference because of an element of humiliation and embarrassment. Items such as bags, wallets, notebooks and diaries may, moreover, contain personal information which the owner may feel uncomfortable about having exposed to the view of his companions or the wider public.

UK Home Secretary Alan Johnson [official profile] plans to appeal the decision. As a result, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) [official website] issued a statement [press release] saying that they will continue to use the tactics to protect the public.

The ruling is a blow to the UK's effort to enhance their counter-terrorism efforts, which have recently come under criticism. Last month, the British House of Commons Home Affairs Committee [official website] reported [JURIST report] that the UK's 1.2 billion-pound e-Borders [official website] program would likely be found illegal under EU law. The program was intended to provide the UK Border Agency (UKBA) [official website] with a more effective and efficient security system by collecting and analyzing information on all passengers entering or leaving the UK. In September, the UK government released [JURIST report] a second terrorism suspect from a control order [JURIST news archive] that subjected him to virtual house arrest because it did not want to reveal secret evidence. The UK Law Lords ruled [JURIST report] in a series of decisions in 2008 that the government could continue to impose control orders on terror suspects in lieu of detention, but said that some elements of the orders violate human rights.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.