The Exchange

Cross-posted from Open Democracy and written by Guy Aitchison > claims to protest and civil disobedience are in flux as the burgeoning state crackdown on the language, culture and rights to dissent is criminalizing the political voices of all citizens from civil society. What role is there for human rights protections and standards in all of this?

Important developments showing how protest in this country is being criminalised and undermined are now being brought to the attention of the mainstream. Not by the BBC of course which remains as spineless as ever when it comes to challenging the regime’s slide into authoritarianism, but by Channel 4 and the Guardian.

First, there was last week’s Ready for a Riot, the Dispatches documentary which asked an important question, namely is training officers for “public order” policing in battle-like conditions, where they’re pelted with petrol bombs, and then kitting them out like stormtroopers, the best way to ensure they fulfil their obligations under human rights law to “facilitate” peaceful protest? Or is there a tiny little danger that, as Denis O’Conor, of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (whose report on protest policing is released soon) said, this approach becomes “self-fulfilling”? The G20 showed for everyone to see on YouTube that a bunch of pumped-up stormtroopers are less likely to be in the mood to “facilitate” the peaceful protest of a few hundred campers than crush it mercilessly, even when the enemy has its hands in the air shouting “this is not a riot”.

So, who is responsible for setting such inappropriate training for riot officers then? Why it’s the Association of Chief Police Officers, of course. And why are they apparently so oblivious to their obligations under human rights law? Well, wouldn’t you like to know. But you can’t. Because they’re a private company not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

This is the same “self-created, para-judicial, non-parliamentary, private corporate” body whose “terrorism and allied matters” branch manages the network of databases police use to monitor protesters and disrupt their activities, as Anthony blogged yesterday following the Guardian’s report.

What has been the response of the government to these disturbing revelations? Are they concerned about this threat to our democratic rights coming from an unaccountable private company? Not at all! Why, they’re positively breezy about the whole thing, as Stuart White points out in an excellent post on Next Left: 

Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, has weighed in on The Guardian’s story that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is running a ‘giant database of political activists’ whom it categorises as ‘domestic extremists’.

Alan tells us, on the one hand, that ‘I haven’t issued any guidelines [to police] on the definition of that phrase [domestic extremism].’ Roughly translated: if the police are doing something dodgy, it’s not my fault....

But then he also tells us: ‘The police know what they are doing, they know how to tackle these demonstrations, they do it very effectively.’

Let’s just pause here for a minute. Isn’t it revealing that Alan regards demonstrations as things that have to be ‘tackled’?

And then there is the claim that ‘the police know what they are doing’ and handle (sorry, tackle) demonstrations ‘very effectively’.

To put it mildly, these comments are not altogether persuasive in light of what happened at the G20 protests in April.

You can read the rest of the post here.

Provoked by the Guardian’s report on ACPO’s databases (the existence of which followers of FIT Watch will already have been familiar with) I have submitted the following question to the Metropolitan Police Authority’s new civil liberties panel which meets on November 5th:

The panel will be aware that the Guardian is currently running an investigative series into the networks of databases used by police to track and monitor so called “domestic extremists”, a category invented by police to describe campaigners who might engage in civil disobedience regardless of whether they have committed a crime. The three national police units who manage the databases are apparently run by the “terrorism and allied matters” committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Will the panel look into: What guidelines are given to police on who should and should not be on these databases? Who has access to these databases? Who is the information shared with, both in the public and the private sector? And how long is the information retained on the databases?

I’ll let you know if I get a reply.