RESTRICTING PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT LEGAL!
• Restricting Photography Is Not Legal! – The Home Secretary has said there is no legal basis for restricting photography in public places. Unfortunately the statement was made in a more-or-less stock response to an NUJ letter alleging MET targeting of photojournalists.
The NUJ alleged the Metropolitan Police Forward Intelligence Team were targeting photojournalists covering demos. The Home Office reply didn't really address this. It restated some of their usual statements about photographers' rights to work in public and said the Home Secretary left it to the Commissioner whether to monitor photographers in reasonable circumstances. It suggested the NUJ should address their concerns to him. (They had done.)
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Labels: civil liberties, NUJ, photojournalism
posted by Simon Towler at Monday, July 14, 2008
2 Comments:
The police ARE the law. Under the repressive regimes that this government seems to be doing its best to emulate, the police are free to do what they like. During the Third Reich, Himmler made a point of putting the SS above and beyond the law and history records the uses they made of that!
We must hang on to our freedoms or it will happen here.
I agree, police forces in this country have a high degree of operational freedom, but within a highly regulated environment. They also have a great deal of independence from central authority - which also serves as a check on that authority. None of this makes the police the law, though.
Unfortunately, it's not part of the brief of the police to defend constitutional liberty or human rights. In fact, it's the job of Chief Constables to ask for as much powers as they think they might get, and somebody else's job to tell them they can't have them. It would be nice if our Government did this for us, but the current one doesn't appear to want to.
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