Today, 23 October, a High Court will weigh evidence in human rights lawyer Fahad Ansari’s judicial review against the home secretary and North Wales Police. The trial focuses on the fact that police detained Ansari under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at Holyhead Port in August 2024.
The police seized Ansari’s work phone during the stop. Given that Ansari is a lawyer, his phone contains legally privileged information on his clients. Schedule 7 grants cops extra powers to use against people at the UK’s borders:
It allows them to stop, question and when necessary, search and detain individuals and goods travelling through the UK’s borders to determine whether they may be involved or concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.
This is likely the first time that Schedule 7 powers have been used against a practicing lawyer. As such, the decisions in today’s case could have lasting repercussions for privacy and surveillance in the UK.
Today’s hearing was intended to decide whether there will be a ‘closed’ session to the proceedings, and whether the police could be prevented from examining Ansari’s phone. However, Ansari stepped outside the courtroom earlier to announce that the hearing had entered that closed proceeding.
‘That’s what this is all about’
Ansari thanked the assembled crowd outside of the courthouse for braving the rain. He recognised that they were showing solidarity “not just with me, but with Palestine, because that’s what this is all about.”
Ansari was one of the lawyers who filed Hamas’ challenge against their proscription in the UK. He’s consistently called out his harassment by UK authorities as being motivated by his legal work. As such, he told the assembled crowd today:
Whatever the smokescreen, whatever the charade that’s been going on inside, we all know in our bones that this is about Gaza, this is about Palestine, and that’s why I’ve been dragged through these courts this morning.
Anti-government-overreach campaigners CAGE reported that Ansari had decided ahead of time to boycott the Closed Material Procedure (CMP) element of the trial. Anas Mustapha, head of public advocacy at CAGE, stated that:
Mr Ansari’s decision exposes a growing crisis of accountability in the UK’s justice system. The use of closed hearings and secret evidence has long eroded public confidence in due process – but for this to extend to the legal profession itself marks a dangerous new threshold. That this entire process was triggered by a Schedule 7 stop highlights how this mass surveillance tool is an all-pervasive power that enables the circumvention of due process at every level.
‘What’s the point of that?’
Today, Ansari explained:
It’s not break time, it’s not lunch time, I’ve unceremoniously been kicked out of the courtroom, as have my lawyers and the members of the public, because now the court is going to go into secret, into closed, where they will justify to the judge – only – why they detained me, why they felt the need to take my phone.
They’ve kindly given me what’s called a ‘special advocate’. This is a security-vetted barrister who is not allowed to speak to me because he’s seen the closed material. So I’ve decided that I’m not going to engage with that process at all. I told them I did not want a special advocate. But they said ‘we have to give you one because the rules say so, and that will give some level of fairness to you.
A judge who has previously acted as a special advocate is presiding over today’s hearing. More specifically, this was as part of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC). The judge reportedly withdrew from a case in the commission, citing the unfairness baked into the secret court system.
Ansari echoed that same sentiment, calling it a “rigged system”, and telling the crowd:
The way the closed material procedure works is, the special advocate who is given to me to represent me, I can only speak with him and he can only speak with me until he sees the material. But what’s the point of that? He doesn’t know what to ask me, I don’t know what to tell him. So what I’ll end up doing is shooting in the dark, offering up information that could be there, about people I know, places I’ve been, my opinions, anything and everything that could be on my phone[…]
A veneer of legitimacy
According to Ansari, that data given over to the special advocate ends up feeding into UK intelligence-gathering mechanisms. It would be used to harass other people connected to him, “and through me connected to anyone they feel I’m connected to.”
As such, he stated that:
So, it is simply a mechanism for the police, for the intelligence agencies, to gather, collect and refine intelligence. By giving this a legal term, closed material procedure, by having a special advocate who will represent my interests, apparently, in court, all they are simply pretending to give it some sort of judicial oversight, legitimacy, when there is a symbiotic relationship between the judiciary and the intelligence services. The judiciary say ‘look, there’s due process’ and the intelligence services have a way to gather intelligence and say there’s accountability. In reality there’s nothing, there is simply a false economy […] that there can be such a thing as fairness coupled with secrecy.
Ansari made it clear: if the courts truly believed he was guilty, then the public deserved to see the evidence. Secrecy, he told the crowd, could not lead to justice. He went on to highlight the fact that the UK has sold its fundamental rights to privacy and a fair trial. We’ve traded our freedom away in the name of fighting terrorism.
The last 25 years of war and terror has conditioned the British public to accept secret evidence in our courts, to accept an abandonment of the rule of law, to accept people being arrested for terrorism for holding up placards.
At that, the crowd responded with cries of ‘shame, shame!’ Ansari finished by saying:
We have been fighting this for over two decades. Now is not the time to back off, and the fact that all of you guys are here today really encourages me. It’s not about me, it’s not the fact that I’m a solicitor, a lawyer, the principle is greater than this.
Nobody should be allowed to take your phone at a border without suspicion, I need to stress that, and do a digital strip-search on you, under the compulsion that if you do not comply you will be convicted of terrorism. That is not what should be happening. And it is not about me, I need to stress this, it is about all of us, and most fundamentally, it is about Palestine.
Free Palestine.
This goes beyond one person’s rights, it’s a reckoning with the death of due process in a state ruled by secrecy. When the law itself becomes a tool of surveillance, justice doesn’t just fail — it vanishes.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.