Making It Easier for Police to Stop and Search

Amidst the chaos of Brexit, Home Secretary Sajid Javid found time to announce a plan to relax restrictions on the use of section 60 of the 1994 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) so as to make it easier for police to stop and search anyone in a specific area if serious violence is anticipated. The new rules are targeted at the seven urban police force areas, where the overwhelming majority of the black population in this country lives, and are part of a wider Home Office strategy on serious youth violence and knife crime. The Home Office has also just launched an eight-week consultation on a proposal to impose a legal duty on public sector organisations to cooperate in multi-agency initiatives to combat knife crime, including through data sharing. Such a duty could indirectly require doctors, teachers and other public sector workers to identify children at risk of being involved in knife crime to partner agencies, including the police.

For all the talk of moving towards a supposedly different ‘public health’ approach to knife crime, both proposals, when coupled with the government’s plan to introduce a new ASBO-type knife crime prevention order that could see kids as young as 12 sent to jail, show that the same discredited law and order approach is behind the new initiatives. The government is showing bad faith, manipulating genuine fears about young people’s safety, while attempting to define ‘public health’ in its own narrow law and order terms. Its new public order duty is likely to be just as unpopular and contested as the Prevent duty of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 on specified authorities to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.
Historically, s.60 has mainly been justified as necessary to combat knife and other violent crime within urban areas, usually those with a high concentration of young black people. Section 60 is the source of highly unequal treatment of black people, as they are over twenty times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people under it, with only a tiny minority subsequently arrested and then for minor crimes such as low-level drug possession.

Source: IRR News


Extradition Blocked Due to Fear of Flogging

The case G.S. v. Bulgaria (application no. 36538/17) concerned a Georgian national’s complaint that if extradited to Iran, where he faced theft charges, he would be at risk of being flogged. In Chamber judgment in the case the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there would be a violation of Article 3 (prohibition of torture and of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights if the applicant were extradited to Iran because of the possible punishment that awaited him there. The Court found in particular that the Bulgarian courts had simply assumed that the only penalty for the applicant in Iran would be imprisonment.

However, the offence of which he stood accused, namely theft, was also punishable by flogging. Indeed, there was a risk that he would be sentenced to up to 74 lashes, taking into account international reports and other information showing that flogging was commonplace in Iran, and considered by the Iranian authorities as a legitimate form of punishment. Moreover, unlike the Bulgarian authorities, the Court had profound misgivings about trusting assurances against torture given by a State where such treatment was endemic or persistent.