Court rules in Wood v MET that surveillance and retention of photographs of activists is incompatible with Human Rights Act

Posted on 25 May, 2009 by M. Vermeulen
On Thursday a ruling by the Court of Appeal found the police had broken the UK’s Human Rights Act when they undertook a surveillance operation against Campaign Against Arms Trade in 2005. The court of appeal, relying on Marper v UK, ordered the Metropolitan police to destroy photographs its surveillance teams had taken of arms-trade campaigner Andrew Wood.

Lord Justice Dyson said:

“The retention by the police of photographs taken of persons who have not committed an offence, and who are not even suspected of having committed an offence, is always a serious matter.”

Lord Collins said:

“There was a very substantial police presence … when I first read the papers on this appeal, I was struck by the chilling effect on the exercise of lawful rights such a deployment would have.”

The case follows an investigation by the Guardian that revealed police had been targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years.

Andrew Woods open ed in The Guardian.
Court ruling: Wood v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis [2009] EWCA Civ 414 (21 May 2009)

Filed under: Data protection, Privacy, Surveillance, UK |

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2 Responses

  1. Gregory Greene, on 25 May, 2009 at 9:14 pm said:

    There’s big money in the arms trade, and no doubt, some of that filters down to the level where police operations are decided. And there are big names in the trade, too–not least of them the Bush family.

    The further we go down the road towards fascism, the more glaring will be the misuse of surveillance. In my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century I state the following: “…right through human history, it has never yet happened that a tool of tyranny, once developed, hasn’t been used.” That goes for all kinds of surveillance technologies; even when they’re too intrusive for our current sense of morality, those in power will work to provide threats we perceive as directed against us until we no longer object.

    Reply

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