UK Court: David Miranda Detention Legal Under Terrorism Law [View all]

[Hissyspit]

Source: The Intercept

UK Court: David Miranda Detention Legal Under Terrorism Law

By Ryan Devereaux

19 Feb 2014, 5:23 AM EST

A British lower court has ruled that London police acted lawfully in employing an anti-terror statute to detain and interrogate David Miranda for nearly nine hours at Heathrow Airport last summer, even while recognizing that the detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom.”

In a decision released Wednesday morning Lord Justice John Laws, Mr Justice Duncan Ouseley and Mr Justice Peter Openshaw said that while Miranda’s detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom” it was justified and legitimate due to “very pressing” issues of national security.

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After the police’s justification was made public in November, leading UK human rights groups and a member of the British parliament expressed outrage, saying it appeared baseless and threatened to have damaging consequences for investigative journalism, the Guardian reported .

Greenwald told The Intercept the UK has the unique distinction of being the only foreign government that has equated the NSA coverage he and Poitras are responsible for to terrorism.

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“We made clear long ago that we would not ever be deterred in any way in reporting aggressively on these documents by this kind of thuggish behavior from the British government, and we have been and will continue to be very true to our word,” Greenwald added. “It is ironic that as the world rightfully condemns the Egyptian military regime for imprisoning Al Jazeera journalists on the ground that their journalism is a form of ‘terrorism’, the UK Government yet again shows the repressive company it keeps by doing the same.”

http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgments/miranda-v-sofshd.pdf

Read more: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/19/uk-court-david-miranda-detention-legal-terrorism-law

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Greenwald's Response:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/19/uks-equating-journalism-terrorism-designed-conceal-gchq

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Equating journalism with terrorism has a long and storied tradition. Indeed, as Jonathan Schwarz has documented, the U.S. Government has frequently denounced nations for doing exactly this. Just last April, Under Secretary of State Tara Sonenshine dramatically informed the public that many repressive, terrible nations actually “misuse terrorism laws to prosecute and imprison journalists.” When visiting Ethiopia in 2012, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns publicly disclosed that in meetings with that nation’s officials, the United States “express[ed] our concern that the application of anti-terrorism laws can sometimes undermine freedom of expression and independent media.” The same year, the State Department reported that Burundi was prosecuting a journalist under terrorism laws.

It should surprise nobody that the U.K. is not merely included in, but is one of the leaders of, this group of nations which regularly wages war on basic press freedoms. In the 1970s, British journalist Duncan Campbell was criminally prosecuted for the crime of reporting on the mere existence of the GCHQ, while fellow journalist Mark Hosenball, now of Reuters, was forced to leave the country. The monarchy has no constitutional guarantee of a free press. The UK government routinely threatens newspapers with all sorts of sanctions for national security reporting it dislikes. Its Official State Secrets Act makes it incredibly easy to prosecute journalists and others for disclosing anything which political officials want to keep secret. For that reason, it was able to force the Guardian to destroy its own computers containing Snowden material precisely: because the paper’s editors knew that British courts would slavishly defer to any requests made by the GCHQ to shut down the paper’s reporting.