SECRET POLICEMAN'S BILL

There’s yet another piece of government legislation sneaking its way through parliament that will give the state even more privacy but strip away what remaining few rights to privacy you have left. The Coroners and Justice Bill 2009 contain clauses that will give formal cover to perpetrators of state violence and will blow a hole in what little data protection there exists for the public.

The bit dealing with inquests allows the Secretary of State to appoint a judge to hear an inquest into a person’s death in secret - there would be no jury and relatives of the deceased would not be allowed in. A secret hearing can be ordered under a wide range of possibilities: national security, diplomatic relations, for the prevention or detection of crime, to protect the safety of a witness or third party, or on general public interest grounds. In other words the government will have a green light to prevent any embarrassing information about someone’s death being made public knowledge. It’s obvious they want no repeat of the embarrassing revelations that came out in the Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry (see SchNEWS 647).

But even if this doesn’t make it into law the security services already have power to withhold information under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act: facts relating to covert surveillance can be withheld from an inquest. This has led to massive delays in inquests, for example Azelle Rodney’s, who was shot six times by armed police in April 2005. In August 2007 the coroner ruled that he could not hold a full inquest because of the large number of passages crossed out in police officer’s statements. Under the new laws Azelle’s family would still not know the full truth as to why he died as the inquest would likely be held behind closed doors.

INQUEST (www.inquest.org.uk) argue that “The proposals amount to a fundamental attack on the independence and transparency of the coronial system in England and Wales; are fundamentally flawed; disconnected from legal principles and have come about without any consultation.”

And this isn’t the only Big Brother state intrusion on the cards of course. The government are seeking to remove all limits on the use of personal information - including medical, financial and employment records and communications data. A proposed clause would amend the Data Protection Act so as to allow ministers to grant ‘information sharing orders’, enabling the sharing of data with other agencies (including private companies and foreign governments) for purposes other than the original one. The only proviso is that it needs to fill a “relevant policy objective” - a phrase that could be easily pressed in to service to fit any situation. As campaigning group NO2ID (www.no2id.net) say: “The data sharing powers in this Bill are a perversion of justice and of language, converting the Data Protection Act into its exact reverse. If this passes, you can forget you ever had privacy.”