BNP get police to arrest socialists

From this weeks issue of The Socialist.

On Tuesday 14 July I was arrested, along with two other Socialist Party members, on alleged public order offences following a complaint made by local members of the fascist-led British National Party

Dylan Roberts, Wrexham Socialist Party

The BNP's allegations were entirely without substance, and were a poor attempt at intimidation. The complaint related to campaigning on Saturday 30 May, when we were running a stall in Wrexham town centre.
We were promoting the No2EU-Yes to Democracy European election challenge and campaigning against the BNP. We had spent two hours campaigning prior to the local BNP mob arriving and setting up a stall a few yards away from us.
The BNP outnumbered us, but we did not rise to their deliberate attempts to provoke us. A member of the BNP approached us and made a number of racist comments, while another BNP member filmed us for several hours.

Arrests

One Socialist Party member was arrested at his home on 14 July at around 9am. I went to the police station of my own accord at around midday, where I was arrested. The third Socialist Party member went to the station after finishing work at 5pm, and he was also arrested.
We were detained for up to two hours each. We were asked to provide a statement, and then subsequently to provide fingerprints and DNA, and we were photographed. We also spent time in the 'custody suites'.
North Wales Police (NWP) treated us courteously, and the arresting officer behaved in a very professional manner. Nonetheless, the police had no evidence whatsoever, which leaves the question of why NWP chose to arrest us for what was evidently a fabricated charge.
We were bailed unconditionally, to appear back at Wrexham police station in August. The following morning we were contacted by the arresting officer, who advised us that there would be no further action.
We had to spend a fair amount of time in custody, and our DNA will be retained for 12 years, despite not being charged.
We were told that we had been arrested because NWP had a duty to investigate the complaint, and that the only way in which the police could investigate was to arrest us. It is not acceptable for the police to detain socialists and anti-fascists simply for campaigning against the BNP.

Judiciary challenged over the right to protest

I'm currently writing an essay for uni on preventive detention and saw this in this weeks issue of the Socialist. I'm goona put up a few more posts on this subject in the next week or so.

THE MAY Day Detainees went back to court last week. This time they appealed to the House of Lords against the judgement from the High Court, which said it was lawful for the Metropolitan Police to hold 3,000 anti-capitalist protesters for up to nine hours in Oxford Circus on May Day 2001.

Socialist Party reporters

Then, the detainees were contained and surrounded by rows of riot police and police on horseback and told they were not allowed to leave and were denied access to toilet facilities, food and water.
The May Day Detainees set up a campaign in defence of the right to protest which has involved court action, accusing the police of false imprisonment under the Human Rights Act.
The test case detainee is Lois Austin, Socialist Party member and campaigner. Lois was refused permission to leave the containment even though she had to collect her eleven month-old baby from a nursery.
The trial judge, Judge Tugendhat, proclaimed that the detainees were not aggrieved by their detainment but in actual fact quite enjoyed it! He also said that while there was a deprivation of liberty the police had no choice but to hold the crowd in this way because it was necessary to prevent a breach of the peace.
The findings of the original judgement are extremely dangerous for the right to protest in this country. It gives a green light to the police to ban any protest because one or two members of the crowd may be involved in, or about to commit, activity the police deem to be violent or threatening a breach of the peace.
The court of appeal took the view that there was no deprivation of liberty. They found that the detention in Oxford Circus was akin to holding away fans at a football match or holding car drivers up on a motorway after an accident.
They also said that the police action was justified under article 51b of the Human Rights Act because the crowd was being held to assist police officers in carrying out their duties, which were to arrest those threatening a breach of the peace. Apart from article 51b, the court of appeal said that the Human Rights Act did not come into it.
The detainees will get the verdict from the law lords in a couple of months but if the discussion in the court is anything to go by, it isn't looking good.
Human rights
The sometimes surreal discussion on issues relating to human rights was eye opening at times.
A discussion on rights that we all believed to be unqualified, like the right not to be tortured, or to be illegally imprisoned, was alarming. Some of the law lords at the trial seemed to be hinting that maybe torture only becomes torture once a certain threshold is reached!
The May Day detainees' QC had to remind the law lords that the right not to be tortured is, according to the Human Rights Act, an unqualified right and thresholds of what is acceptable do not come into it.
We have to wait and see what the Law Lords' judgement will be. There didn't seem to be much sympathy for the detainees during the hearing. Whatever the verdict, the right to protest is under attack and must be defended.

The Socialist Crime Fiesta

This weeks socialist features a wealth of article of interest to the budding left/socialist criminologist. We have articles on youth crime, the exeter attempted terrorist attack, civil liberties, a review of a crime tv programme and a report of barbaric violence in South Africa. To read these go to http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/main/The_Socialist

Counter-Terrorism Bill – Massive Expansion of Powers

Passing through parliament at the moment is the governments latest set of measures to tackle terrorism. This is yet another toughening up of existing powers and represents no new direction to anti-terrorist policy. And if the previous policies clearly weren’t working what’s the point in increasing the harshness of them. But this new legislation is not about protecting people, it’s much more about our capitalist government having the power to do what it wants.
The most talked about aspect of the bill is the planned extension to the time that ‘terrorist’ suspects can be detained without being charged from 28 to 42 days. But alongside that there are other elements such as a terrorism register, increased powers to take documents, DNA and fingerprints, allowing the use of phone tap evidence, and most worrying of all perhaps is the power to ban the public from inquests (ie. Into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes).
All these measures are attempts to circumvent accountability and remove more and more freedom from people. It’s an attempt to expand New Labour’s license to do what they want and move in a direction of a police state. These attacks will require action by the labour movement to defeat and further actions to return the other rights that have been stolen from us in the name of the ‘war on terror’.
Rather than removing even more civil liberties there are several ways that terrorism can be combated. Firstly ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan that act as recruiting sergeants for right-wing political Islam. But more fundamentally, we need to put an end to the rule of profit and competition which led the US and UK to engage in these imperialist conquests and create a world in which we eradicate poverty and suffering.

Immigration and Detention

This piece takes a look at the growing increase of the use of detention of immigrants and asylum seekers discussed in an article by Mary Bosworth titled ‘Immigration Detention’ in the Spring 2008 issue of Criminal Justice Matters.

As Bosworth notes, especially after 9/11, increasingly mandatory uses of detention are being made in the case of immigrants. Not only is this being used on all sorts of foreigners – from those who have overstayed their visas, to asylum seekers, to those who have completed a prison sentence.

As Bosworth points out, Britain leads the way in confining the greatest number of asylum seekers for the longest period of time. And of these immigrants which are held (this isn’t just including asylum seekers), 85 per cent are held in Immigration Removal Centre (of which 7 are contracted out to private security firms, whereas 3 are run by the prison service), 13 per cent are confined in prison and the remaining 2 per cent are in short-term holding facilities (whatever they are?).

However, immigrants detained as these are under the Immigration Acts are not being detained as criminals – yet as we have seen they are being held in the same or very similar institutions as those convicted of criminal offences. As Bosworth points out though, they are being held in places which were (or still are) penal establishments, being looked after by prison trained staff and being administered by former criminal justice system administrators.

Parallel to the crackdown on civil liberties is a crackdown on the rights of non-citizens of a country. But like terrorist legislation, it may find it’s way to affect the rest of the population – Bosworth reports that in Australia citizens of that country had been falsely deported.

So how, do I conclude such a piece as this? I think that for one thing, these actions can only fuel nationalistic and racist tensions in a country. Secondly, that this is to some extents making mountains out of molehills – what benefit is there to punishing immigrants and asylum seekers for being just that? Rather, as ever, we need to remove the social conditions that have led them to become these labels.

Security, Civil Liberties and Terrorism

This piece is some reflections on an article by Lucia Zedner entitled Securing Liberty in the Face of Terror: Reflections from Criminal Justice from the Journal of Law and Society. Although several of these recent posts have and will be discussions based on journal articles – this doesn’t mean that the issues are only intelligible to Criminologists – indeed that would be a very dangerous assumption.

In the so-called ‘war on terrorism’, governments have made many attacks on civil liberties in the name of increasing security. Often there is an assumption of a balance between the two that needs to be met, but that the ‘terrorist threat’ has upset the equilibrium and necessitates it swaying away from civil liberties towards security. Zedner’s article focuses particularly on critiquing this notion of balance as well as the relevance of criminal justice to terrorism legislation.

Zedner asks three questions on this notion of balance; What tips the balance? In whose interests? What lies in the scales? She argues that particularly when we have such an ill-defined threat such as terrorism, then any legislation can be extended fairly easily (she cites the example of legislation for Nothern Ireland being extended to Britain) – especially when you have defined someone where ‘the proof of guilt is a mere formality’. She is also critical of the culture which demands ‘that even the innocent individual must positively welcome surveillance, arrest, or interrogation as being in his or her own (as part of the collective) security interest’.(pg514)

Zedner also points out that such a balancing act is impossible to do in any kind of scientific way, as she notes ‘Precisely because it s unknowlable, prospective risk always threatens to outweigh present interest’.(pg.516) Indeed, with such a ‘threat’ the balance is never stable, as she notes ‘The deployment of security as a pursuit is potentially hazardous therefore because it presumes an endless quest, which must continually anticipate and forestall the next challenge by pre-emptive measures.’(pg.518)

However, there are points I would disagree with Zedner’s analysis. Firstly, she assumes that ‘cases of catastrophic risk, public officials may act extra-legally to engage in preventative interrogational torture (that intend to elicit information with which to avert a catastrophe).’(pg.521) actually exist. As one of the other students in my criminology lectures points out (he is doing his dissertation on the topic), these situations have never really existed – it is just an abstract moral question with no basis in reality. I also disagree with Zedner when she says that ‘These are not normal times…’(pg,522) because of the heightened threat of terrorism, but during the 70’s and 80’s wasn’t there the threat of IRA terrorism in Britain, what about Timothy McVey in the US for example? I must add, she does firmly advocate due process and human rights during all of this, but she should be critical of these assertations and the interests they serve.

Zedner as I have mentioned correctly defends due process and advocates that ‘Measures against terrorist suspects should, as far as possible, be taken within the mainstream criminal justice system’(pg.529), but I would go further and remove the ‘as far as possible’ from that sentence, after all terrorism is multiple acts of grevious bodily harm, murder etc. She also sees judges as the defendants of due process and civil liberties in general. However, she also points out that ‘Judges have a worrisome tendency to defer to the executive in matters of security, particularly in times of heightened threat’(pg.526). This however, is not something someone with a Marxist view of how the state operates should be surprised about at all. I have discussed the judiciary in more detail elsewhere however.

In her conclusion, Zedner notes ‘Instead of accepting security as an end in its own right, asking ‘security of what?’ obliges us to specify the goods to be secured. Liberty is one such good’(pg.532). I think a more pertinent question would be security for whom, for which group in society is this ‘war on terrorism’ being conducted? Although Zedner’s article raises some interesting questions, she is far from supplying the answers.