Human rights group challenges police over counter-terrorism powers

Human rights group Cage is calling on the government to repeal powers that allow police forces to copy data from mobile devices belonging to people detained and interrogated at the UK border.

According to a report published by the group, 420,000 people have been stopped at the border under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 since 2010, which gives the police broad powers to interrogate and detain any person at an international airport for up to nine hours.

While detained, police have the power to conduct searches, seize electronic devices and collect biometric data, such as fingerprints and DNA, from the individuals affected.

Detainees are also legally obliged to answer all questions and to supply passwords for their devices, as it is a criminal offence to refuse.

According to the report, largely compiled from the testimonies of detainees, only 81 people have been charged and 30 individuals convicted under the Schedule 7 rules.

“Out of those stopped, only 0.007% have been convicted of any crime, meaning 99.993% of people stopped are innocent of any wrongdoing,” Cage’s communications manager, Anas Mustapha, told Computer Weekly.

“Any power that the police or the state has which is that ineffective would be classed as draconian, but because it happens in the dark corners of airports, only targets particular people, and has a terrorism label stuck to it, it gets a free pass.”

The Cage report further asserts that 78% of those detained under Schedule 7 in 2016 were from ethnic minorities, before going on to allege that the religious beliefs of those detained is being suppressed.

Computer Weekly understands that the Home Office does not hold the number of Schedule 7 examinations broken down by religion, although Cage claims to have obtained a data collection form used by police during these examinations that would allow them to gather this information.

The form in question came from a disclosure made during court proceedings involving Cage’s international director Muhammed Rabbani, who was prosecuted after refusing to hand over his phone and computer passwords when police stopped him at Heathrow.

Even so, without this data Cage said it is difficult to accurately assess the impact of Schedule 7 on targeted communities, despite anecdotal accounts in the report suggesting members of the Muslim community are being unfairly targeted for detainment.

In a letter addressed to Anna Soubry, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, Cage director Adnan Siddiqui described the detainment of individuals under Schedule 7 as “a manifestation of structural Islamophobia, which is experienced as harassment”.

In a statement to Computer Weekly, a Home Office spokesperson hit back at the report’s findings, claiming that between January 2015 and June 2018, Schedule 7 examinations assisted in 30% of cases where an individual was later charged under the Terrorism Act. 

“The use of Schedule 7 is vital to the police in their work to combat terrorism, and the authors of this report are clearly misrepresenting facts to fit their own pre-determined conclusions,” the spokesperson said.

“In his 2014 report, the former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Lord Anderson QC, found no evidence of the power being exercised in a racially discriminatory manner. He also said that one would expect its exercise to be ethnically ‘proportionate’ to the terrorist population that travels through UK ports.”

At the time of writing, the Home Office is in the throes of running a public consultation on a revised draft of the Schedule 7 Code of Practice, following the introduction of amendments introduced through the emergence of the Border Security Act 2019.