Thanks to Tony Blair, the UK moved aggressively in many ways to limit freedom including the over-use of so-called anti-terror laws. It rapidly became a catch all to arrest anyone such as photographers and activists. The EU ruling doesn't stop the process though it may force the UK government to change the law or at least limit the use of the law. The Guardian:
But the judgment – in the case of Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton, who were stopped and searched on their way to a demonstration outside the Excel Centre in east London in 2003 – is far wider than that. It criticises the entire process by which section 44 stop and searches under the Terrorism Act 2000 are authorised by the home secretary, and highlights a lack of adequate parliamentary and legal safeguards against abuse.
The judges say that because officers' decisions about whether to stop and search someone in a designated area are based solely on a hunch or professional intuition, the effect is "a clear risk of arbitrariness".
The concerns over this power being so widely framed have led the judges to draw attention to a serious risk of discrimination against black and Asian people, and misuse against demonstrators. There were more than 117,000 searches under these powers in 2008, by 12 police forces across England and Wales, which shows that what is at stake is a key element of the government's counter-terrorism strategy. Home Office lawyers were tonight combing the judgment to see if they could advise the police to carry on with searches while lodging an appeal to the 17-member grand chamber of the European court of human rights.
