Police harassment

Last night we were visited twice by the police at the porch we sleep in at night, at 9.10pm and 1.50am, and if I count a visit from the night before, well, that is three times then – that could probably qualify as police harassment. (Pursuant to Article 34 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Declan has already sent an email letter to the Registrar of the European Court of Human Rights (see blog of 13 May "Letter to the European Court under Article 34") and has also sent the Registrar a copy of his email letter to the Prime Minister Gordon Brown (see blog of 17 May "Letter to the British Prime Minister") – Article 34 establishes a duty on Convention states not to subject applicants to any improper indirect acts or contacts designed to dissuade or discourage applicants from pursuing a Convention remedy.)

The first of these visits was at 11.30pm on Thursday, when we were woken by a police officer to be asked if we were doing ok. Having ascertained our names, she told us to go back to sleep and left. The second, at 9.10pm last night, lasted thirty minutes. PC 136A, PC 474A and PC 525A of Wood Street Police Station informed us that we were not going to be asked to pack up and leave due to this (mysterious) police "cleaning" the City of London of rough sleepers; so the two questions I had prepared did not really apply (see previous blog). We don't look rough sleepers, we were told, and surely we would want to be part of the mainstream once again. We didn't put ourselves in this porch by free choice, Declan said, adding that the Department for Work and Pensions unlawfully put us to the street over a year and a half ago when they terminated our benefits in the middle of judicial review proceedings because he didn't sign on two days before he was due to do so (see paragraph 3 of Declan's application to the European Court of Human Rights, submitted on 8 September 2007, for a brief account of the reason for benefits).

Declan explained that his case in the European Court was filed under Article 8 (the right to respect for his private and family life) and Article 13 (which provides for the right for an effective remedy before national authorities for violations of rights under the Convention), and that the Court may well have invited the Government to set out its observations on the merits and admissibility of the case – in December Declan received a letter from the Court turning down his request of 8 September for priority, but informing him that his application would be examined possibly before the end of January; we remain in the dark about the outcome, however. Declan also mentioned a loophole in the law relating to jobseeker’s allowance (paragraphs 57 - 62 of Declan’s application). Philip Leach in Taking a Case to the European Court of Human Rights states that, more often than not, it is the quality of the domestic law, or even the absence of legal regulation, which leads to violations of Article 8 of the Convention.

PC 525A said that the case could take up to seven years – are we going to be in the street that long? So Declan told him about his petition to the United Nations; that it has been signed by 519 scientists, including 22 Nobel laureates; and that we are in the process of trying to raise £4,000 to run an international campaign in support of the petition - with some of the money we would rent the most basic place imaginable (see blog of 26 March “We are seeking to raise £4,000”).

It was a “welfare” visit - or so my ticket states – the outcome “Satisfactory words of advice”. The advice must have come from PC 474A when she said that we are not entitled to sleep in the street and therefore can be moved at any time and even arrested. Her Police Review magazine may beg to differ: in the April 2007 issue an article entitled “Rough Sleepers” states that “people have the right to sleep in the streets if they want to”, and in this respect the police “need to comply with the Human Rights Act 1998”. Curiously, the May issue of The Pavement, a free magazine for London’s homeless, says that shopkeepers in the big tourist area of the Strand (Westminster area) are abandoning the Whitehall Safer Neighbourhood [police] Team’s “No sleeping” signs on their shop fronts, claiming that they are no longer effective so “we prefer to call the police if we have any problems or incidents”. (We, by the way, sleep in the porch of an office building, bed down at 9.00pm, get up at 4.30am, and don’t drink or smoke – hardly material for a complaint.)

Our third visit, at 1.50am last night, was from PC 601B. As we are already well acquainted (see previous blog), she gets straight to the point: we have to pack up and leave right away due to, yep, police "cleaning" the City of London of rough sleepers. When I show her the two “welfare” tickets we were given only a few hours earlier, she says “OK”, and off she goes. No tickets.