Miscellaneous -
Human Rights
Sean
Taylor-Sabori, jailed for smuggling drugs worth
£268,000, claimed police who nicked him invaded
his privacy by snooping on his pager messages. He
was awarded £3,000. He won his case at the
European Court of Human Rights after his appeals
were twice thrown out by British courts. And
Taylor-Sabori, 40, also SUED police over a
£7,000 debt he is said to owe under a court
confiscation order. The crook was sentenced to
ten years in 1998 after running a gang which
imported Ecstasy from Holland. He had been tailed
for nine months by drug squad cops who won a
court order to clone his radio-pager and receive
his messages.
That meant information sent between gang members
also flashed up on police bleepers. Armed
officers swooped when they received details of
the drugs pick-up and stopped a Range Rover on
the M4 near Bristol. Inside was a bag containing
22,393 Ecstasy tablets. Copies of
Taylor-Sabori’s messages were used in
evidence at the gang’s Bristol Crown Court
trial. He later launched two appeals claiming
cops had acted unlawfully. Both failed, but six
Strasbourg judges have now ruled unanimously that
the interception of the messages and their use at
his trial was “an unjustified interference
with his private life and correspondence”.
They ordered the Home Office to pay him £3,000
to cover costs and expenses at an October
hearing. The Government was forced to pay up as a
signatory to the convention of human rights.
Police Federation chairman Jan Berry said,
“It’s human rights gone mad when
justice forgets that everyone else has rights,
too, and deserves to be protected from
individuals like this.” Norman Brennan, from
the Victims of Crime Trust, said, “It is
about time this country considered pulling out of
the European Court of Human Rights. It does
nothing to safeguard the law-abiding member of
the public but seems to do everything to assist
criminals in their many frivolous claims.”
Stephen
Perry, a convicted armed robber, was awarded
£1,000 in damages because police breached his
human rights by filming him to obtain evidence
for identification purposes. Wolverhampton police
resorted to secret filming him when he repeatedly
refused to attend identity parades after having
been arrested and bailed. But human rights judges
in Strasbourg said the police video was a
"ploy" which amounted to an
interference with their suspect's right to
"respect for private life", guaranteed
by the European Convention on Human Rights. In
addition to £1,000 damages, the judges awarded
Perry £7,000 in costs and expenses, in a ruling
which effectively sets limits on how far police
can go in using filming tactics to obtain
identification evidence for use in court. Try arguing that the next time you’re flashed doing 34mph in a 30mph zone.
Asylum,
bogus or otherwise, is costing us all in the
region of £2billion. Under the “human
rights” act, we have no right to decide who
lives in this country. We are expected to house,
feed and pay benefits to anyone who turns up and
utters the magic words. Judges take no account of
the will of Parliament or the will of the British
people. Until we make them accountable, nothing
is going to change.
The
father of tragic James Bulger says the European
Court ruling which helped free his son’s
killers was “a victory for murderers”.
Ralph Bulger was appalled by the decision in 1999
which led to Robert Thompson and Jon Venables
being released under new identities in 2001. Euro
judges decided the schoolboys, who abducted
two-year-old James from a Bootle shopping centre
in February 1993, were unfairly treated because
their trial was “severely intimidatory”
in an adult court.
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