Davis v Lisle [1936] 2 ALL E.R. 213

Rice v Connolly [1966] 2 All E.R.649

The ability of UK police to use “arbitrary” counter-terror stop and search powers against peace protesters and photographers lay in tatters today after a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights.  The Strasbourg court ruled it was unlawful for police to use the powers, under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to stop and search people without needing any grounds for suspicion.

The widely-drawn ruling said that not only the use of the counter-terror powers, but also the way they were authorised, were “neither sufficiently circumscribed, nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse”.  The use of these powers has grown fourfold, from 33,177 times in 2004 to more than 117,200 in 2008.  The Metropolitan police have used them most, but 11 other forces in England and Wales also make routine use of them.  A political furore ensued when it was disclosed that the whole of Greater London had been secretly designated for stop and search without suspicion since 2001.

The case ruled on today was brought by Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton, who were stopped by police while their way to a demonstration outside the annual arms fair at the Excel centre, in London’s Docklands, in September 2003.  Quinton, a journalist, was ordered to stop filming the protest despite showing her press card, while Gillan, who was riding his bicycle, was only allowed to go on his way after 20 minutes. They were awarded €33,850 (£30,400) in costs and expenses.

 The European judges said the power to search a person’s clothing and belongings in public included an element of humiliation and embarrassment which was a clear interference with the right to privacy.  But they also criticised the way in which the police use of stop and search powers was authorised. There is no requirement that the powers be considered “necessary” – only “expedient”.  The use of the powers is subject to confirmation by the home secretary within 48 hours, renewable after 28 days, but the European court said there was no real check on authorisations by parliament or the courts.

Hated checkpoints top list of Palestinian targets

By Phil Reeves in Jerusalem @ Friday, 22 February 2002

Palestinians say that last month, a Palestinian man, Nasar Salim Rantisi, was shot in the leg and bled to death at the checkpoint, near Ramallah, when soldiers denied him medical care. Jihad Yaghi, 23, said this week the soldiers at Ein Ariq tried to force him to crouch and creep beneath a waist-high wire, stretched across the road before allowing him to pass. “They humiliate us,” he said. “I am very happy about the attack.”

Israeli army checkpoints, universally loathed by the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza as the cause of daily humiliation and economic misery, are at the top of the target list of Palestinian armed groups.

An Israeli doctors’ group has been named as one of the four winners of this year’s Right Livelihood award – dubbed the alternative Nobel prize.  Physicians for Human Rights Israel was recognised for operating mobile clinics in occupied Palestinian territories and campaigning for patients’ rights.  The Rights Livelihood awards honour the power of grassroots change, the Sweden-based foundation said in a statement. Four recipients will share the 200,000 euro (£172,000; $273,000) prize.  The award was founded in 1980 by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull to recognise work he felt was being ignored by the Nobel Foundation.  Other winners of the 2010 awards include Nigerian and Brazilian environmentalists, as well as Nepalese community activists.

Campaigning doctors

The prize will be presented to the four recipients in a ceremony at the Swedish parliament on 6 December, four days before the Nobel Prizes are handed out.  Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) was included for its “indomitable spirit” in working for the right to health for all people in Israel and the Palestinian territories, the Right Livelihood foundation said in a statement. The Tel Aviv-based group was founded in 1988 at the start of the intifada by Dr Ruchama Marton and Israeli and Palestinian physicians.  It provides healthcare to impoverished Palestinians and migrant workers, and lobbies against what it sees as repressive policies of the Israeli government.  In a statement, Dr Marton said that the award strengthens the group’s “ongoing struggle against all sources of oppression”. As a result of the blockade of Gaza, hospital facilities are extremely poor, medicines are scarce and dozens of people die each year waiting for permission to be treated in Israel, the UN has said.  Although Israel and Egypt have eased the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the movement of Palestinians is still severely restricted. Israel says the restrictions are necessary to pressure militants to stop firing rockets from the Hamas-run territory.

29 September 2010 Last updated at 21:22

Jewish activists who sought to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza say they were treated harshly when Israeli forces seized their vessel.  Yonatan Shapira, an Israeli air force pilot turned peace activist, said he was shocked with a Taser gun while passively resisting arrest.  And a British journalist said he was “ambushed” and “almost strip-searched” by commandos on board the vessel.  Israel’s military had said the vessel was seized peacefully on Tuesday.  It declined to comment on the activists’ accounts.  Earlier this year, Israeli commandos killed nine people in clashes on board a Turkish ship trying to reach Gaza.  Israel says its blockade is designed to prevent weapons being smuggled to the militant Hamas movement which runs the territory.

Harsh treatment

Yonatan Shapira, a member of left-wing group Combatants for Peace, said he was treated “brutally” by Israeli soldiers when the ship was intercepted some 20 miles (30km) off the coast of Gaza on Tuesday.  “After they boarded, I was standing with my hands around Reuven Moskowitz, the 82-year-old holocaust survivor,” he told BBC News. “We were trying to protect each other and singing: ‘We shall overcome.’  “The Israeli navy captain came closer and pulled out his Taser gun and said: ‘If you don’t let go… it will hurt.’  “We continued to hug and he shot me twice on my right shoulder. It was painful, but not as bad as the third shot.

“He moved the life vest I had on, so he could reach closer to my heart and shot me, which made me lose control of my body. It felt like an epileptic attack or something.  At that point I couldn’t hold anything and they grabbed me brutally to the boat.”

British photo-journalist Vish Vishvanath confirmed that Mr Shapira had been hit by the stun gun.  After his deportation to London, Mr Vishvanath said he had been “almost strip-searched” by Israeli special forces, who confiscated all his equipment. 

“About three commandos ambushed me and took all my camera gear. They confiscated my cell phone because it had a camera on it,” he told the Press Association.

He said the activists put up “a lot of resistance”, but that no violence was used.

Activists freed

The Irene, dubbed the Jewish Boat for Peace, was carrying what the activists called a symbolic amount of medicine, a water purifying kit and toys.  The Israeli army diverted the boat to the port of Ashdod and said the gifts would be screened and transferred overland to Gaza.  All five Israeli activists were questioned and released without charge. Three of the four foreign nationals were deported late on Tuesday. The fourth, a German nurse, would be deported in the next few days, organisers said.  Israel and neighbouring Egypt shut down Gaza’s border crossings when an Israeli soldier was captured in June 2006, and tightened the blockade further when the Islamist Hamas movement gained control of Gaza a year later.

Israel began allowing consumer goods into Gaza after its May raid on a Turkish aid ship sparked international outrage. Nine activists were killed when Israeli commandos intercepted the ship in international waters.  But it still blocks all exports from the territory, imposes a complete naval blockade, and severely restricts the movement of people.  Israel says the naval blockade is required to stop arms being smuggled to Hamas, but critics and humanitarian groups say this amounts to collective punishment of the territory’s 1.5 million people.

By CRAIG MURRAY, Former Ambassador to Uzbekistan and Head of the Foreign Office’s Maritime Section – Last updated at 11:44 01 April 2007

Like most senior Royal Navy officers, Commodore Nick Lambert has great reserves of professional expertise and common sense. The Coalition task force commander was aboard HMS Cornwall when 15 Royal Navy personnel serving on the frigate were seized at gunpoint by Iranian forces on March 23.

A few hours after the 15 were seized, Cdre Lambert said: ‘There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters. Equally, the Iranians may well claim that they were in their territorial waters. The extent and definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated.’ And his predecessor in command of the task force, Commodore Peter Lockwood of the Royal Australian Navy, said last October: ‘No maritime border has been agreed upon by the countries.’  Both officers told the truth. It is the burial of this truth by No 10 spin doctors, and Tony Blair’s remark that he is ‘utterly certain’ the incident took place within Iraqi territorial limits, that has escalated this from an incident to a crisis. Blair is being fatuous.  How can you be certain which side of a boundary you are when that boundary has never been drawn?  I am best known as the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, but from 1989 to 1992 I headed the Foreign Office’s maritime section. This included responsibility for territorial sea claims and for negotiating our own maritime boundaries. The expertise of the Royal Navy was invaluable.

For eight months I also worked with Royal Naval and Defence Intelligence Service personnel in the Embargo Surveillance Centre, a secret unit operating 24 hours a day from an underground command centre in Central London to prevent Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement.  We analysed information from intelligence and other sources, and could instruct Royal Naval craft in the Gulf to board and inspect individual ships. I was responsible for getting the political clearance for operations just like the one now in question, in this exact location. So I know what I’m talking about.  There is no agreed boundary in the Northern Gulf, either between Iran and Iraq or between Iraq and Kuwait. The Iran-Iraq border has been agreed inside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, because there it is also the land border. But that agreement does not extend beyond the low tide line of the coast. Even that very limited agreement is arguably no longer in force. Since it was reached in 1975, a war has been fought over it, and ten-year reviews – necessary because waters and sandbanks in this region move about dramatically – have never been carried out.  But what about the map the Ministry of Defence produced on Tuesday, with territorial boundaries set out by a clear red line, and the co-ordinates of the incident marked in relation to it?  I have news for you. Those boundaries are fake. They were drawn up by the MoD. They are not agreed or recognised by any international authority.  To put it at its most charitable, they are a potential boundary. It is accepted practice, where no boundary exists, to work by a rule-of-thumb idea of where a boundary, based on a median line between the two coasts, might be.

But to elevate that to a hard and fast boundary, and then base a major international incident on being a few hundred yards one side or the other, is out of order.  Negotiating a maritime boundary is horribly complicated. To set a median line you agree a series of triangulation points on both coastlines and do a geometric triangulation exercise to find a line running out from the coast.  Of course, both sides will argue about which triangulation points on the coast to use. You are allowed, for example, to draw a line across a bay entrance and use that as the coast, but there is plenty of room for the other side to argue over where that line is drawn. That is only the start. For territorial seas you start at the low tide mark and uninhabited rocks and sandbanks count.  There is huge room for argument – ownership of a useless sandbank is not necessarily a settled thing. Then it really gets complex. What if the sandbank appears only at low tide or moves? In this area of the Gulf, sands shift endlessly.  It is, in short, impossible to say where a real, negotiated or adjudicated Iran-Iraq boundary might eventually lie. It is also why the instinct of both the Foreign Office and MoD was to play this quietly and negotiate our people back. But the No10 spin doctors stepped in, seeing a propaganda opportunity to portray Blair as fighting evil Iranians.  Navy and Foreign Office experts were horrified at the notion of publishing that map. In doing so we entrenched Blair’s ridiculous boast that our 15 Navy personnel were definitely in Iraqi territorial seas, and claimed the right to dictate Iran’s boundary.  It’s not surprising Iraq backed British claims – the map is favourable to them. But it makes compromise on the captives very difficult.

Of course, the Iranians equally cannot say unilaterally that these are their territorial waters, and act as if they owned them.  In disputed waters it behoves everyone to act with caution and respect. Plainly the Iranians are not doing that.  None of this vindicates Iran’s aggressive behaviour in holding the captives or the so-called confessions.  For Iran to detain the British sailors in these circumstances was  rovocative and bellicose.  To hold them for a few hours could have been taken as a legitimate, if over forceful way, of indicating their claim to the disputed waters in which the British personnel boarded a neutral vessel. But Iranian behaviour in the past few days has tipped over into the plain illegal and indefensible. However I have no doubt Blair is delighted at last to have a Middle East issue with popular support before May’s elections.  Yes, Iran has a bad government that is behaving stupidly. But perhaps it is not alone. Both sides have to climb down. We have to state that no agreed border exists and that we had no intention of straying into Iranian waters.  The Iranian government should let our people go immediately. That is the way out of this mess for both sides.

September 27, 2010 – The Israeli military expressed a “pointless violence” when they intercepted a flotilla going in Gaza May 31, said Monday in Geneva Judge Karl Hudson-Phillips, head of the International Mission of independent establishing the facts established by the Council on Human Rights. Nine civilians died and several others were injured in the incident against a flotilla of ships that went to Turkey to bring aid to the population of Gaza, which is blockaded by Israel since 2007. The mission, which is different from the Panel of Eminent Persons set up in early August by the UN Secretary-General to consider the same incident, said the Israeli military behavior towards passenger fleet was “disproportionate and excessive,” said J. Hudson-Phillips to the Board of Human Rights in which he presented the 56-page report prepared by the Mission.

The report, which was released last week estimated that the interception on the high Mavi Marmara Sea, a ship belonging to the fleet, was “clearly illegal.” The three members of the mission believe that there is enough evidence to bring criminal prosecutions. They regret that the Israeli government has refused to cooperate with the mission. According to Judge Hudson-Phillips, no weapons have been seized on ships in the fleet with the exception of a few slingshots. When it appeared that Israeli forces were planning to board the Mavi Marmara, a very small group of passengers were armed with sticks and iron railings ripped from the ship, “he said. There is no evidence that shots were fired in the direction of Mavi Marmara ships carrying Israeli military said the judge.

In contrast, “the Israeli military fired live ammunition against the passengers of Mavi Marmara, killing nine of them and wounding over 50 others, six of the deceased were victims of summary executions, two were shot after have been seriously injured and then they could not defend itself, “said Judge Hudson-Phillips. The Mission Council of Human Rights has also found that Israeli forces, after seizing control of the Mavi Marmara handcuffed almost all the passengers and made to kneel for hours. When they have landed at the port of Ashdod, they tried to get them to sign confessions that they had entered Israel illegally. Those who refused to sign or give their fingerprints have been beaten. The mission, headed by Justice K. Hudson-Phillips, a former judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, interviewed over 100 witnesses in Geneva, London, Istanbul and Amman. The Mission also has two other members: Desmond de Silva, a former prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and Shanthi Dairiam, former member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

Translated with : http://translate.google.com/

(AP) – 24 minutes ago

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan has criticized a pair of NATO airstrikes on its territory that killed over 50 militants, saying they were a violation of its sovereignty. U.S. officials have said they have an agreement that allows aircraft to cross a few miles (kilometers) into Pakistani airspace if they are in hot pursuit of a target. But Pakistan denied Monday such an agreement exists. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press release Monday that the mandate of foreign troops in Afghanistan ends at the Afghan border. Pakistan said that unless corrective measures are implemented, it will have to “consider response options.” The airstrikes occurred Saturday in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area after militants attacked a small Afghan security post near the border. ISLAMABAD (AP) — NATO helicopters based in Afghanistan carried out at least two airstrikes in Pakistan that killed more than 50 militants after the insurgents attacked a small Afghan security outpost near the border, spokesmen said Monday.  NATO justified the strikes based on “the right of self-defense.” Pakistan is sensitive about attacks on its territory, but U.S. officials have said they have an agreement that allows aircraft to cross a few miles into Pakistani airspace if they are in hot pursuit of a target.

The first strike took place Saturday after insurgents based in Pakistan attacked an Afghan outpost in Khost province, which is located right across the border from Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area, said U.S. Capt. Ryan Donald, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. “The ISAF helicopters did cross into Pakistan territory to engage the insurgents,” said Donald. “ISAF maintains the right to self-defense, and that’s why they crossed the Pakistan border.” The strike killed 49 militants, said U.S. Maj. Michael Johnson, another ISAF spokesman. The second attack occurred when helicopters returned to the border area and were attacked by insurgents based in Pakistan, said Donald. “The helicopters returned to the scene and they received direct small arms fire and, once again operating in self-defense, they engaged the insurgents,” said Donald.  The strike killed at least four militants, said Johnson.  

The tribal area where the strikes took place is largely controlled by militants who regularly carry out attacks against NATO troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. rarely uses manned aircraft to carry out strikes in North Waziristan and instead relies on drone attacks that American officials refuse to acknowledge publicly. Pakistani intelligence officials said two NATO helicopters carried out a third strike inside Pakistani territory on Monday morning, killing five militants and wounding nine others. The strike occurred in the village of Mata Sanger in the Kurram tribal area, which is directly across the border from the Afghan provinces of Paktia and Nangarhar, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.  Donald, the NATO spokesman, said officials were still investigating and could not confirm or deny reports of the attack in Kurram.The Pakistani military could not be reached to comment on the NATO attacks.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Pakistan anger at Nato-led cross-border raids

27 September 2010 Last updated at 17:54