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".
Our chairman in North Carolina, Dr Stephen Mumford, pays SiteGround $1,000 a year to ensure that our Church and State website runs smoothly, even with 100,000 daily visitors. We actually have a very good Cloud hosting package (2x3.0 GHz CPU Cores, CentOS, 4GB RAM, and 20GB SSD), which is why we shouldn't be experiencing this sort of non-access to our site. Here is paragraph 12 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that he dispatched last Friday.
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER
THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE
INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
Paragraph 12 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations on the subject of harassment, surveillance and interception of communications by the UK's Security Service (MI5) and/or Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) over a period dating back to September 2003
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, GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) specialises in the "4 D's": deny, disrupt, degrade, deceive. It has been branded by the press as the spy agency's "deception unit". Though its existence was secret until 2014, JTRIG has 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 GCHQ 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. Simon Davies, president of the London-based Privacy International, asks: "If spying on human rights NGOs isn't off limits for GCHQ, then what is?"
'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
An overview of the e-books we have published so far is available at Church and State Press here. All proceeds from these four e-books go to Network for Church Monitoring with the authors' permission.
We will wait until the next Facebook block to continue working on our case against Facebook Ireland for the European Small Claims Court. This is paragraph 38 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that he dispatched yesterday (see previous blog). It cites the seven Facebook blocks we have experienced since 1 December 2015.
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER
THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE
INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
Paragraph 38 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations citing seven Facebook blocks since 1 December 2015
38. At a preliminary hearing on 3 February 2016, District Judge Silverman ruled that the county court does not have the authority to intervene in what is an administrative dispute with a public body. The following incidents since the Applicant's lodgement of his claim in the county court in September 2015 - by no means exhaustive - serve to highlight the Applicant and his wife's high needs as a result of strong opposition and disruption:
(i) On 9 December 2015 the Applicant's wife's laptop was rendered useless for work after it was made technically incapable of publishing material on their Church and State website. She could solely not use her laptop to create a WordPress post, add images, or click on most of the platform's buttons. This could only have been an attack on her laptop because the platform worked perfectly well on the Applicant's laptop and on an old laptop they use as back up. She had posted videos of the attack to the N4CM blog before the device was mysteriously returned to normal functioning the following afternoon.
(ii) On 16 December 2015 the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) upheld the Applicant's complaint against the Ministry of Justice for breach of the Data Protection Act 1998. The ICO found that the Ministry had mishandled the Applicant's subject access request for a copy of the GLA's application to contest the court's jurisdiction, filed at Central London County Court on 14 October 2015 (see annex 19, pp 57-59).
(iii) In a letter to the Applicant dated 22 December 2015, Shadow Home Office Minister Lyn Brown stated that she had written to the managing director of Facebook UK in her capacity as the Applicant's parliamentary representative to seek an explanation for why Facebook had twice blocked his wife from posting to groups and removed all her postings to groups since 2010 (1-4 December and 5-7 December 2015), without any stated reason or cause or responding to either of the Applicant's wife's appeals. The Applicant had already issued a Letter Before Claim to Facebook Ireland, the entity with which users based outside the USA and Canada have a contractual relationship, with a view to filing a legal claim with the European Small Claims Court.
(iv) On 3 February 2016, while the Applicant was at the hearing of his claim against the GLA, his wife received for the first time an alert from their hosting company SiteGround stating that the Church and State website had used 90% of its available storage and warning that the site could experience service problems without an upgrade. It took two days of correspondence between the Applicant's wife and SiteGround before this problem was rectified. According to a technical support supervisor, the reason for the 90% usage was "the cPanel upgrade done by our system administrators recently".
(v) Despite the contents of both letters cited in (iii) above, Facebook has additionally five times blocked the Applicant's wife from posting to groups (6-9 January, 12-15 January, 20-22 January, 13-16 February and 23-26 March 2016) and twice removed all her postings to groups since 2010 (6-9 January, 12-15 January 2016), without any stated reason or cause or responding to any of the Applicant's wife's five additional appeals. Facebook Ireland has not responded to the Applicant's pre-action letter of 15 December 2015, nor, to the best of his knowledge, has the managing director of Facebook UK responded to Shadow Home Office Minister Brown's letter of 22 December 2015.
This is what Shadow Home Office Minister Lyn Brown says she wrote to Facebook UK on our behalf last December:
We have twice been forced to live on the streets - for almost 4 years in total; from 4 November 2006 to 13 July 2009, and again from 14 April 2013 to 15 May 2014. The second time, while enrolled on a winter night shelter programme for rough sleepers run by the West London Churches Homeless Concern, we were asked if we would be willing to be housed by the Mayor of London's Greater London Authority (GLA) Housing First programme. Housing First is an internationally acclaimed programme for entrenched rough sleepers, the core principle of which is the provision of permanent accommodation and non-compulsory support (Johnson and Teixeira, 2010). We thought this was too good to be true and of course it has turned out to be just that.
Less than four months into our tenancy we were informed that GLA Housing First was only a pilot project and was ending within months. Having sunk the deposit we had for a private sector flat into our new housing association home (it came without furnishings of any kind save cooker, fridge and carpets), we were referred by the GLA against our wishes to the Mayor of London's Clearing House service, operated for the Mayor by St Mungo's. GLA Clearing House provides a coercive programme of support and eligibility for flats terminates as soon as individuals are deemed to no longer require support to live independently. We have only kept the roof over our heads for the past two years because Declan has been challenging the GLA's referral decision in the courts. In paragraph 39 of the updated complaint below to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Declan explains how we could now be looking at a third High Court application for judicial review against the GLA since our tenancy began in May 2014 - the paragaph is presented in isolation in the previous blog. This is his "threat to life" paragraph 40 that follows:
Paragraph 40 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations re the threat to life posed by the suspected sabotage of our tenancy by the Mayor of London's Greater London Authority (GLA) Clearing House service, operated for the Mayor by St Mungo's.
40. The Applicant may have no option but to challenge in the High Court (Judicial Review) the decision of GLA Clearing House to breach its February 2016 agreement with him to provide voluntary support. As the matter stands, and as the Applicant has repeatedly pointed out in court papers, there is a threat to life and wellbeing in this case 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 having been informed that as GLA Housing First clients they had the possibility to extend their tenancy agreement beyond the expiry of the initial term. Family Mosaic provided the flat without any furnishings of any kind save cooker, fridge and carpets. 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 bedroom and living room windows.
(ii) The Applicant is in his mid-fifties and during his and his wife's first period of homelessness was twice hospitalised, once with pneumonia in December 2006 and the second time with a viral infection in October 2007. In April 2014, during their second period of homelessness, the Applicant was diagnosed with asthma and a chest infection (see para 31 above). Asthma 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 on 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 out of where they had been sleeping that included the Applicant's wife being threatened with arrest on the trumped-up charge of assaulting a police officer (see para 32 above). Since the escalation of the migration crisis this past summer, the police have more powers to move rough sleepers on without having to resort to unlawful means to do so.
Declan sleeping on a bus early in the morning on 4 May 2014. Less than a month earlier he had been diagnosed with asthma and a chest infection. But a week after the diagnoses, the City of London Police visited us at our sleeping pitch and forced us to move on. Their behaviour was so outrageous that we had no choice but to sleep on night buses until our flat finally came through on 17 May 2014. (UN complaint, para 32)
It seems incredible to us that of all the homeless organisations in London it should be St Mungo's - given our history with this charity (UN complaint, paras 28-29) - and its Mayor of London's Clearing House service that we are now battling to keep a roof over our heads. And this after just concluding a battle royal with St Mungo's over fabricated data they were withholding against us in defiance of a court order issued last May (UN complaint, para 37(iv)). A friend of ours in Washington DC put it well earlier this month when he wrote: "The nature of Bureaucracy seems too often to lead good, well meaning people into decisions that don't connect with fair outcomes. Hope you can sort this out without further ado, but I doubt it." We doubt it too, and perhaps High Court this time also means Court of Appeal and European Court of Human Rights - just to have a roof over our heads next winter, if at all possible.
Paragraphs 50-56 of the complaint above outline why the Vatican and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church should be monitored.
'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
***
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. As Declan states in paragraph 8 of his complaint to the UN above, 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. According to BBC Panorama, Shayler "caused the biggest crisis of official secrecy since the spy catcher affair"; he was jailed for seven weeks in 2002 for breaking the Official Secrets Act. It is indeed unfortunate that Shayler declared himself the Messiah in 2007, became a squatter, and was subsequently ridiculed in the press for changing his name to Delores Kane. A New Statesman article published in 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 him the following year reveals 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)
Former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler "caused the biggest crisis of official secrecy since the spy catcher affair", according to BBC Panorama. He was jailed for seven weeks in 2002 for breaking the Official Secrets Act.
39. At the hearing on 3 February 2016, District Judge Silverman rebuked counsel acting for the GLA for saying that the Applicant had refused support, clarifying that there is a distinction to be made between refusing support and not accepting coercive support. He spoke in summation of the "home" the Applicant and his wife have made for themselves with their own money, how impressed he was with the Applicant's behaviour in court, and the commitment he received from the said counsel to arrange round table talks. The Applicant met with St Mungo's CEO Howard Sinclair on 25 February 2016, with the manager of the GLA Clearing House in attendance. It was agreed subsequently in writing that support would be voluntary (see annex 20 and 21, pp 60-65). However, by email of 9 March 2016 the manager of GLA Clearing House informed the Applicant that a further meeting would be arranged in April 2016 to discuss an agreement for support. The Applicant and his wife suspect that this is a manoeuvre to sabotage the renewal of their 2-year supported housing tenancy in May 2016, the week after Family Mosaic had emailed the Applicant a draft version of their renewed tenancy agreement for signing. In addition, St Mungo's has ignored a request from the Applicant for a draft version of the agreement for support that he and his wife will be asked to sign the month before their tenancy is up for renewal.
It's not like we do not have a history when it comes to St Mungo's. They left us living on the streets for over a year despite the fact that we could pay a deposit on a flat and one month's rent up front. On 29 August 2013, Declan filed a claim in the High Court for judicial review against Commissioner of Police for the City of London Adrian Leppard and Home Secretary Theresa May following the decision of the former not to ask the charity (then called Broadway) to engage with us in relation to our welfare and access to its service for supporting clients to find accommodation in the private rented sector. Deputy High Court Judge Bidder ruled: "The refusal of the First Defendant to ask the charity 'Broadway' to engage or help the Claimant and his wife with their welfare or accommodation is not arguably unreasonable. It is not its job to intervene in any disagreement between a charity and those seeking that charity's help".
'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
An overview of the e-books we have published so far is available at Church and State Press here. All proceeds from these four e-books go to Network for Church Monitoring with the authors' permission.
We have spent an entire week dealing with the Mayor of London's Clearing House service, run by St Mungo's, and its processing of our personal data. Nonetheless, we have been denied disclosure of all the information our landlord (Family Mosaic Housing Association) or any third party can see by logging into the Clearing House system. On Thursday Declan complained to the Information Commissioner. By issuing St Mungo's CEO Howard Sinclair with this data subject notice yesterday, he has exercised his section 10 right under the Data Protection Act 1998 to prevent processing likely to cause damage or distress:
Click to enlarge
It's not like we do not have a history when it comes to the processing of our personal data by the Mayor's Clearing House service. This is a court order in relation to data held against us that St Mungo's (then called St Mungo's Broadway) stood in defiance of for over eight months:
Our chairman in North Carolina, Dr Stephen Mumford, pays SiteGround $1,000 a year to ensure that our Church and State website runs smoothly, even with 100,000 daily visitors. We actually have a very good Cloud hosting package (2x3.0 GHz CPU Cores, CentOS, 4GB RAM, and 20GB SSD), which is why we shouldn't be experiencing this sort of non-access to our site. The article here identified is what we happened to be working on when we were temporarily blocked this evening:
'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.
The nature of Bureaucracy seems too often to lead good, well meaning people into decisions that don't connect with fair outcomes. Hope you can sort this out without further ado, but I doubt it.
- A friend in Washington DC
Yesterday Declan was told he would receive a like for like tenancy agreement no later than 12 noon today. At 11.54am, we received an entirely new agreement which we now have to challenge in the High Court (Judicial Review) in an action against Greater London Authority. Here is the wrong decision by the Mayor of London's Clearing House service that renders non-renewable our renewable 2 year fixed term Assured Shorthold Tenancy:
Click to enlarge
District Judge Silverman ruled last month that the county court has no authority to intervene in what is an administrative dispute with a public body.
As Declan points out in the updated complaint to the United Nations that he is currently putting the finishing touches to, 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 that Shayler declared himself the Messiah in 2007, 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 him the following year reveals 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.
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.
