SHAFAQNA- The detaining of Muslims at UK ports and airports for up to nine hours under Schedule 7, has become so widespread that the practice has become Islamophobic, according to a new report published by human rights group Cage on Wednesday.
The Cage detainee rights’ organisation has said that “potentially close to one million” people have been stopped under Schedule 7. The law allows officers to detain people without suspicion and hold them for up to nine hours at airports, ports and international rail stations.
Only 100 people have been charged and 44 convicted since the law came into force in 2001.
Schedule 7, officially titled Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, is a counter-terrorism power that allows law enforcements to “stop and question, and, when necessary, detain and search individuals” who are travelling abroad. The Government states that this is to determine whether the individual is involved in the “commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism”.
The report argues, “Our conservative estimate of the number of people stopped, including those screened, is swell over 500,000 and potentially close to one million.”
The published statistics do not include people who were only stopped for an initial “screening process”.
Cage international director Muhammad Rabbani has been stopped over 20 times under Schedule 7 powers. He said, “The discrimination faced by Muslim travelers highlights how embedded Islamophobia is in Schedule 7 and in broader counter terrorism powers. Officers routinely ask intrusive questions about religion and practice, which amounts to a modern day inquisition.”
Cage shows how “the law is enforced without any requirement for reasonable suspicion or indeed any suspicion at all”. A list of cases includes people being asked to strip naked, hand over passwords and asked to become informants for the MI5 spy agency.
One British Muslim aid worker told Cage officers “didn’t give any reason” during the at least 10 times they have been stopped. “They just simply said they had the right to do this,” they said.
“They went through my bags and had a look at my phone. They took photos and DNA.”
The aid worker added, “Now they know my movements before I even go. On one occasion I was marched off the plane in front of everybody”, according to socialistworker .
The organisation added there is growing anecdotal evidence that Muslim women are being forced to remove their headscarves when stopped, even though the rate that such stops lead to a conviction is 0.007%, according to Cage’s analysis of 420,000 incidences.
Due to its practice now becoming widespread, CAGE has made a complaint to the policing regulator, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, on behalf of ten individuals affected by the harassment procedure. It is also reported that the organisation has written to MPs on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims to “spell out” concerns regarding these detentions, islam21 told.
In the letter, Adnan Siddiqui, the director of Cage, said that tens of thousands of people were being subject to “suspicionless stops” and that “the practice is a manifestation of structural Islamophobia, which is experienced as harassment”.
One Briton, Omer, who asked only to be identified by his first name, told the Guardian he had been stopped 40 times when returning to the UK since 2005 but has never been convicted of any offence.
Omer said “I get stopped 95% of the time, coming back from Belgium, France and Italy.” He said he had become so fed up with being repeatedly questioned he often used one-word answers to reply.
A former medical professional, Omer was stopped at Heathrow returning from Lahore, Pakistan, after a flight in which he had helped a teenager having a fit. But on leaving the plane he was nevertheless questioned. “This is a law that is almost impossible to beat.”
One of Cage’s complaints is that the Home Office does not respond to freedom of information requests breaking down the number of people stopped by their religion. But a study conducted by Cambridge University researchers in 2014 concluded 88% of those stopped were Muslim.
Cage has complied a dossier summarizing its complaints about schedule 7, which is partly based on a string of case studies it has compiled. Siddiqui said that the organisation had noticed that recently “a number of Muslim women had been asked to remove their hijab at a schedule 7 stop”.
In his letter to the MPs, Cage’s director added “This request seems not to correlate with any appropriate investigation in relation to any form of terrorism, but seems to be a form of humiliation which can amount to a breach of equality legislation.”
A woman returning from Mecca was stopped and held at an airport for five hours, according to the Cage dossier, despite having felt unwell on the plane. She was separated from her husband and son, asked for fingerprints, a DNA sample, her luggage was searched and her phone taken.
The woman asked what she thought about the 2017 Westminster terror attack, and wars in Syria and Yemen. “I said I didn’t agree with killing innocent people,” she recalled, before being released, having been told “you have complied with the laws”.
Muslims stopped say that questions frequently focus on their religious beliefs, and they are asked if they pray frequently, if they fast and if they have been to Mecca.
“The whole thing is done in such a way as to make you feel that you are doing something wrong for simply practicing Islam,” said a filmmaker who had previously worked for aid organisations in Syria but on this occasion was travelling to Amsterdam via Dover.
Britain’s Muslim community received hundreds of anonymous letters over a two-year period starting in June 2016 calling for violence and abuse against Muslims. Authorities subsequently arrested a man who pled guilty to the racist letter campaign, CNN mentioned.
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