Schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act, under which a Guardian journalist’s partner, David Miranda, was held for nine hours at Heathrow, is an odd piece of legislation – not least because, unusually for criminal law, it deals with people who are for the most part wholly innocent. It is drafted with the intent – and has clearly had the effect – of detaining large numbers of innocent people to ask them about their terrorist activities.
As a result about 70,000 people were detained under Schedule 7 in 2011-12 – of whom only 24 were then arrested for terrorist related offences.
The authorities are perfectly happy with this appalling hit rate. The official guidance to officers when they use Schedule 7 is as follows: “Examining officers must take into account that many people selected for examination using Schedule 7 powers will be entirely innocent of any unlawful activity … All persons being stopped and questioned by examining officers must be treated in a respectful and courteous manner.” (Examining Officers under the Terrorism Act 2000 pdf)
The advice points out that “The powers to stop, question, detain and search persons under Schedule 7 do not require an examining officer to have any grounds for suspicion against any individual prior to the exercise of the powers.”
This may seem somewhat bizarre: a crucial anti-terrorism power that needs not even the tiniest scintilla of evidence of a person’s involvement in terrorism before it is operated against that person; and a clear acknowledgment that, for the most part, the examining officer will be wasting his own and the traveller’s time. Read the rest of this entry
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