Check out our news website Church and State to find out about our writers and read some amazing stories: http://churchandstate.org.uk. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the site; for details, see this blog's sidebar under "Church and State".
County Court at Central London, Royal Courts of Justice
On 11 September 2015 the Central London County Court issued Declan's claim against the Greater London Authority (GLA) for terminating our eligibility for our flat without the right of review or appeal. A month later Declan was told by the Court's telephone service that he would only have the GLA's application to dispute the Court’s jurisdiction served upon him by the court if the judge does not dismiss the case, and that he would therefore have to apply for it under the Data Protection Act 1998 before the judge's order if he wanted to be sure of getting sealed paperwork for the Court of Appeal. The Data Protection Act allows up to 40 days for the Court's response to Declan's Subject Access Request (SAR) of 15 October 2015 to be posted to him. However, we have yet to receive either the judge's order or a written response to Declan's SAR from the Court, which Royal Mail tells us was received by them on 19 October 2015 (over 40 days ago). This is Declan's initial SAR complaint to the Information Commissioner:
12. It is important to underscore that the discriminatory surveillance suffered by the Applicant and his wife is not an isolated event. Rather, it is emblematic of a larger pattern of surveillance by law enforcement officials in the UK that has been well-documented by international and domestic human rights bodies. For example, the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) specialises in attempting to "discredit, disrupt, delay, deny, degrade, and deter" targets and has been branded by the press as GCHQ's "deception unit". Though its existence was secret until last year, JTRIG quickly developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in "dirty tricks" like deploying sexual "honey traps" designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks and generally warping discourse online. Previous reporting on the spy agency established its focus on what it regards as political radicalism. Beyond JTRIG's targeting of Anonymous, other parts of GCHQ targeted political activists and groups deemed to be "radical", even monitoring human rights NGOs. The London-based Privacy International asks: "How many more problems with GCHQ's secret procedures have to be revealed for them to be brought under control?"
10. The Applicant remains aggrieved by the decision of the IPT to dismiss his claim without calling upon information or evidence in addition to that provided by him, which he had informed the tribunal was "wide-ranging", including but not limited to papers, correspondence, contracts/agreements, and photographic records from his wife's blog/diary called "Network for Church Monitoring (N4CM) Blog". (The N4CM blog, which has been vandalised on countless occasions, even carried a screenshot of a Skype chat exposing the homophobic abuse of an American scholar by an anonymous perpetrator.) It was also made known to the tribunal that the Applicant could adduce evidence other than his own. For example, third parties could have confirmed that phone calls from the Applicant had been cut off in mid-sentence and emails sabotaged (see paragraphs 37-38 below).
11. The IPT was created in October 2000 by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and given the power to investigate any complaints against GCHQ, MI5 or MI6, as well as complaints about surveillance operations mounted by the police or any other public bodies. On March 5, 2014, the Guardian reported that the tribunal, which claims to be completely independent of the British government, is secretly operating from a base within the Home Office, by which it is funded. The Guardian article noted that the IPT had investigated about 1,500 complaints, and upheld only 10; five of these concerned members of one family who had all lodged complaints about surveillance by their local council. No complaint against any of the intelligence agencies had ever been upheld. The discovery that the IPT is lodged within a Whitehall department has fuelled criticisms of the court that had been levelled by rights groups, lawyers and complainants. The IPT's critics complain that the secrecy is excessive and that its procedures are stacked so heavily in favour of the government and against complainants that it is fundamentally unfair. Some senior lawyers describe the IPT as "Kafkaesque", while one eminent barrister dismisses it as "a kangaroo court". The Guardian observes: "As a consequence of the secrecy surrounding the tribunal and the perception that it is unfair, many would-be complainants spurn it."
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER
THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE
INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
Paragraphs 1-2 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations
1. The Applicant in this Communication is Declan Heavey, a citizen of the Republic of Ireland who lives in London in the United Kingdom. He was born on 4 September 1960 and is a former teacher. His wife is a naturalized Irish citizen born on 26 March 1965 in Madrid in Spain. She is a former psychologist and lives with the Applicant in London. They have no children. After moving to the United Kingdom in August 2003, the Applicant founded the Network for Church Monitoring (N4CM), a non-profit he registered as a company limited by guarantee in January 2011. He is currently employed as the Managing Director of N4CM, and his wife as the Webmaster of N4CM's website called "Church and State". Edd Doerr, President of Americans for Religious Liberty: "Let me recommend an important website churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting website covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out."
2. The Applicant and his wife were forced to sleep rough on the streets of London for almost four years in total – from 4 November 2006 to 13 July 2009 (see paragraphs 20-22 below), and from 14 April 2013 to 15 May 2014 (see paragraphs 23-26 below) – and they are currently fighting the Mayor of London's Greater London Authority in the courts to stave off eviction from their home (see paragraphs 36-40 below). This notwithstanding that participants in Church and State include 40 Nobel Laureates (two are N4CM Honorary Associates), 13 US National Medal of Science winners, seven prominent members of the UK's House of Lords, and hundreds of other distinguished scholars from around the world. Prior to being made street homeless for the second time in April 2013, having been evicted from the same political 'safe house' former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler lived in until he was made homeless in 2007 (see paragraph 8 below), the Applicant and his wife were nominated for the US-based Population Institute's Global Media Award 2013 for a website described by one of the nominators as "the most important cutting edge population website ever created" (see Annex 1, Declan and Lola Heavey: PI Global Media Award Nominees 2013, p. 18).
'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty
If you would like to help us personally, please feel free to pick up one of our books (shameless plug, I know, but every sale helps us to work our way out of our precarious situation). There is currently five books available in Church and State Press here, and all proceeds from the first four of these books go to us with the authors' permission. Thank you all for all the support you have given us, and I hope we can keep our Church and State website going despite the constant threats.
Declan is currently working on his updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. His paragraph 40 points out that the Mayor of London's Greater London Authority's termination of our eligibility to our flat without the right of review or appeal not only condemns us to a life on the street, but knowingly constitutes a threat to life and wellbeing.
Paragraph 40 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations
40. The GLA has knowingly referred the Applicant and his wife to a scheme that has terminated their eligibility to their flat, effectively condemning them to a life on the street in the short or medium term. Their first period as rough sleepers was from 3 November 2006 to 13 July 2009 following the Department for Work and Pensions' termination of the Applicant's joint claim for Jobseeker's Allowance without good reason, and having denied him the internal appeal process by simply ignoring his letters of complaint (see paragraphs 19-20 above). Their second period as rough sleepers was from 14 April 2013 to 15 May 2014 following their eviction from a political 'safe house' because the live-in landlady's ex-husband, a consultant psychiatrist, required their flat for somebody with a mental illness; this was the same house former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler lived in for a couple of years until 2007, before he publicly declared himself to be the Messiah that same year (see paragraph 8 above). As the Applicant has pointed out in correspondence with the GLA and repeatedly in court papers, the Authority's decision to refer him and his wife to a scheme that terminates their eligibility to their flat in fact constitutes a threat to life and wellbeing taking the following range of factors into account:
(i) In May 2014 the Applicant and his wife took the significant decision to spend on furnishings the deposit they had for a private sector flat after being informed that as GLA Housing First clients they had the possibility to extend their tenancy agreement beyond the expiry of the initial term. Their Family Mosaic Housing Association flat came without any furnishings whatsoever: they did not have a bed, a table, anything to sit on, not even a cutlery item or cooking utensil of any kind in the kitchen. In order to render the flat habitable, the Applicant even had to install shelves that had been removed from the kitchen and replace curtain rails, curtains and net curtains that had been removed from the balcony and bedroom windows.
(ii) The Applicant is in his mid-fifties and while living on the street was twice hospitalised, once with pneumonia in December 2006 and the second time with a viral infection in October 2007. In April 2014, while the Applicant and his wife were living on the street for the second time, the Applicant was diagnosed with a chest infection and asthma, which is a chronic or lifelong disease that can be serious, even life threatening. Pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses are much more dangerous for asthmatics than other people.
(iii) Back on the street the Applicant and his wife will be restricted to sleeping in night buses despite the Applicant's asthma and susceptibility to pneumonia, as they had been prior to coming off the street as a result of an excessive use of force by police officers to move them on from their sleeping pitch that included threatening the Applicant's wife with arrest on the trumped-up charge of assaulting a female police officer if she did not move on. Since the escalation of the migration crisis this past summer, the police have more powers to move rough sleepers on without having to use unlawful means to do so.
Tonight I am posting on our Church and State website a New York Times article by Dr Willie Parker titled "Why I provide Abortions"; he is putting himself at real risk with an article like this!! Here are some Church and State links:
'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty
***
As Declan points out in his updated complaint to the United Nations, we were evicted from our previous flat on 14 March 2013 because according to our then live-in landlady's ex-husband, Dr Nigel McKenzie, a consultant psychiatrist in Highgate Mental Health Centre, our flat was needed for somebody with a mental illness. Former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler also lived with human rights activist Belinda McKenzie in the same political 'safe house' for a couple of years until 2007. It is unfortunate Shayler then declared that he was the Messiah, became a squatter, and was subsequently ridiculed in the press for changing his name to Delores Kane. A New Statesman article dated 11 September 2006 featuring Shayler and Belinda gives no indication that Shayler believed he was the Messiah at that time; whilst a Daily Mail interview with Shayler explicitly shows he believed himself to be Jesus by June 2007. He has never regained his normal self.
The Esquire article below* is mentioned in a Guardian article dated 27 March 2012. It is an eye-opener, highlighting the monitoring and surveillance that Shayler had to live with back in 2000, and the contradictory briefings and slanders that were coming out of the British establishment and the media. The author, Dr Eamonn O'Neill, is a lecturer in journalism at Strathclyde University.
*On 2 May 2013, Issuu removed this pdf from my Issuu account following a copyright complaint by Hearst Communications. I had uploaded the article to my Issuu account in December 2012. In March 2013, when last I checked, the article had been viewed more than 15,000 times. It can be read here.
BBC PANORAMA: The David Shayler Affair (August 1998)
According to BBC Panorama, Shayler "caused the biggest crisis of official secrecy since the spy catcher affair". In 2002, he was jailed for seven weeks for breaking the Official Secrets Act.
Declan is currently working on his updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This is his paragraph 39:
Paragraph 39 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations
39. The Applicant and his wife do not have addictions or mental illness or behavioural issues. Their needs are solely related to the high levels of opposition and disruption they have encountered since moving to England in 2003 from Ireland to run a network of those abused by church (see paragraph 16 above). They have been employed by Network for Church Monitoring since 17 February 2014; nonetheless, the harassment and discrimination has continued unabated. The following illustrative examples (by no means exhaustive) have been cited in court papers and come from the last year alone:
(i) On 4 February 2015 the Department for Work and Pensions awarded the Applicant a consolatory payment of £100 for gross inconvenience resulting from the failure of the Department to issue him with a correct P60 for the tax year 2013/14. Such a consolatory payment is only made in very exceptional circumstances where the errors made are so severe or over such a protracted period of time that it causes the customer clear difficulties in the pursuit of benefits or pursuing a justified complaint.
(ii) On 27 March 2015 Family Mosaic Housing Association awarded the Applicant a statutory compensation payment (£225) for six months of delays with repair work on a bedroom ceiling leak that developed to five feet in length during heavy rain storms. Only following the intervention of the Housing Ombudsman (via the Applicant's local councillor) was the statutory payment finally transferred from the Applicant's rent account to his bank account on 18 June 2015, thereby avoiding the possible suspension or termination of his Housing Benefit claim by Newham Council.
(iii) At a hearing on 8 May 2015, the Central London County Court found sufficient evidence that SHP had acted unlawfully in holding or uploading information about the Applicant relating to his debts, his employment status and an alleged mental health condition and ordered it to pay damages to him for distress of £750 (see Annex 30, Greater London Authority: Order by County Court Judge Brooks, p. 82). Before court proceedings had been issued, SHP was forced to shred a support plan for the Applicant that alleged his and his wife's Church and State website appears "to demonstrate their thinking", that "they appear very grandiose in their thinking", and that "they both demonstrate symptoms of mental ill health".
(iv) On 26 August 2015 the Applicant discovered following a subject access request that GLA Clearing House had failed to comply with the County Court order dated 8 May 2015, which also requested that St Mungo's Broadway remove from its website the same information relating to his and his wife's debts, employment status and alleged mental health condition. The Applicant remains concerned from a fraud point of view that GLA Clearing House withholds inaccurate financial information about him and his wife which gives the misleading impression that their salaries constitute a debt that they have incurred. In fact, the money donated for their salaries for the past two years is no-recourse i.e. donations the donors do not expect money back for.
Upon being satisfied that the Defendant has incorrectly recorded information about the Claimant as to financial position, employment status and that he potentially has mental health problems and upon the Defendant confirming that it will destroy all electronic and paper information that it retains on the Claimant and his wife, Maria Heavey, and upon the Defendant confirming that it will contact St Mungo's Broadway and request that it removes from its website any information about the Claimant and Maria Heavey in relation to debts that they have, their employment status and to specially remove the word "grandiose"... [Emphasis added]
Dated 8 May 2015
Click to enlarge
Before Declan issued court proceedings against the Single Homeless Project for unlawfully holding or uploading information about him relating to his debts, his employment status and alleged grandiosity, the Chairman of Network for Church Monitoring, Dr Stephen Mumford, founder and President of the North Carolina-based Center for Research on Population and Security, provided the homeless charity with this strong rebuttal of their now fully discredited claim that both he and I are mentally ill:
'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty
I am a former social psychologist from Madrid. My husband Declan, a former physical education teacher, is from Dublin. We came to England in 2003 from Ireland with the then-aim of forming a network organisation for those abused by church. We were twice forced, through no fault of our own, to live rough on the streets of London for almost 4 years in total, from November 2006 to July 2009 and from April 2013 to May 2014. Declan established Network for Church Monitoring as a nonprofit company limited by guarantee in 2011. We are currently living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' Section 21 eviction notice from our landlord, Peabody Trust housing association. This notwithstanding that our tenancy is a flat that falls under the Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (see paragraph 3 under "Church and State" below). We have no children.
MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE
(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)
1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.
2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).
3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).
4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.
5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.
"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC
Last updated: 26/06/21
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[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).
[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.