R (Catt) and R (T) v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis [2015] UKSC 9

Happy February! This week we have the last of our Human Rights case summaries from the UK Human Rights Blog. If you are not following them by now, please do check them out here

Case Name: R (Catt) and R (T) v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis [2015] UKSC 9

What’s the case about? Mr Catt was a 91 year-old activist whose details were retained on the Domestic Extremism Database. He had attended a number of demonstrations by a protest group intent on closing down the UK outpost of an American arms manufacturer. The evidence was that some but not all of the members of the group had in the past been intent on violence.

By a majority, the Supreme Court held that the retention of Mr Catt’s data interfered with his Article 8 rights but that the interference was both in accordance with law and proportionate. Among the key factors identified by Lord Sumption were that the police’s common law powers were “amply sufficient” to authorise the obtaining and storage of the kind of information in question, and that they were subject to an “intensive regime” of statutory and administrative regulation. All of the information on Mr Catt consisted of records made of acts he had done in public, and those “primary facts” were and always had been in the public domain. The information was retained for legitimate policing purposes and was not held for longer than required for the purposes of maintaining public order and preventing or detecting crime. Its disclosure to third parties was properly restricted.

In a persuasive dissent, Lord Toulson [65] pointed to the lack of any explanation as to “why it should be thought necessary to maintain for many years after the event information on someone about whom the police have concluded (as they did in July 2010) that he was not known to have acted violently and did not appear to be involved in the coordination of the relevant events or actions.” It is difficult to argue with his rationale:

“[I]f a citizen’s activities are lawful, they should be free from the state keeping a record of them unless, and then only for as long as, such a record really needs to be kept in the public interest.”