In this news article, a student named Rizwaan Sabir who was working on masters degree on terriorist tactics, was arrested after being accused for downloading material for illegal use. He was arrested after the downloaded document was found on an administrator's computer. One of Sabir's supervisor later confirmed that the manual which he was accused of downloading illegally was actually from a US government website and was considered relevant to his research. Nevertheless, he kept in custody for seven days and finally he was released without so much as an apology. Sabir decided to take action and sue the police department for violating his human rights. In the trial Sabir defense team presented evidence that proved that the police were of holding an intelligence file on their client, which contained false information about him and wrongly claimed he had been convicted of a terrorist offence. They were also charged with false imprisonment and breaches of the Race Relations Act 1976 and the Human Rights Act 1998. The proceedings also included a claim under the Data Protection Act 1998 in regards to the intelligence file. The case was set to go to trial on September 19,2001 but due to the mountains of evidence presented against the police department, they decided to settle the case and Sabir was awarded $20,000, compensation for his legal troubles, and the file that contained the inaccurate intellegence evidence was deleted.
In my opinion, this whole thing could've been avoided if the police officials would've had concrete grounds on which to search Sabir. He was falsely imprisoned for a week with no evidence tieing him to any kind of crime. I guess you have to look at the positives that came out of this. Human Rights were definitely reinforced in this case and justice was indeed served.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/14/police-pay-student-damages-al-qaida?INTCMP=SRCH
2 comments:
Great article. I agree with everything you read here. I would like to congratulate the writer and encouraged him to continue writing such valuable materials. Good luck
Its heartening to know that this student was eventually cleared and he received justice, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Terrorism has always had this irrational fear (although after 9/11 it became somewhat rational) around it. And after major global events, and people watching too much news, things get taken to a ridiculous level. This incident should never have happened and this students rights should never have been violated.
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