Greenwald’s Partner David Miranda Mounting Legal Challenge Against The U.K.
2.10pm BST Alan Rusbridger's interviews - Summary
Alan Rusbridger has now been interviewed on BBC News and on the World at One about the David Miranda affair. Here are the main points.
• Rusbridger confirmed that David Miranda is taking legal action over his detention at Heathrow. In particular, Miranda wants the material that was taken from him returned. (Earlier suggestions that it was the Guardian itself taking legal action were wrong, although the Guardian is backing what Miranda is doing. The official line from Guardian HQ says: "David Miranda has filed a legal claim with regard to his detention at Heathrow Airport on Sunday 18 August under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. The Guardian is supportive of that claim." Rusbridger said it was not clear that Miranda was committing any offence taking the material through Heathrow.
If the British state, in whatever form - we are not quite sure which bit of the British state we are dealing with - wants to get that material, then I think they have to do it through a more satisfactory procedure than this bizarre bit of the Terror Act that relates solely to ports and transit lounges of airports.
• Rusbridger criticised schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, the law that allowed Miranda to be held for up to nine hours at Heathrow without the usual legal safeguards.
What you instead have is a kind of vacuum that is not quite Britain, not quite not Britain, in which this Act enables people to interrogate people for up to nine hours and seize all their belongings with no checks and balances. That does not seem a very good way to treat people who are engaged in journalism. There has been a worldwide outcry at the fact that Britain was behaving in that way ...
If they were to arrest David Miranda in the Heathrow car park, they would have to use bits of the law that have checks and balances that are there to protect journalistic material, amongst other things. But by doing it in a transit lounge they are operating in a kind of stateless way where they can interrogate somebody for nine hours, seize whatever they want, under rules that are about terrorism. And once you start conflating terrorism and journalism as a country, I think you are in some trouble.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/aug/20/david-miranda-detention-latest-developments#block-5213558fe4b055bf6bac85a7
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/david-miranda-mounting-legal-challenge-against-uk?ref=fpb
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