Section 44 of the Terrorism Act has been used in recent years to stop & search people, including photographers, illegally. Today the government announced that it is bringing the legislation into line with the ruling of the European court. This means that the police can no longer use Section 44 in the way they were using it before, and can only stop & search people now under Section 43, which requires a *reasonable suspicion* that the person is a terrorist - taking photographs is normally unlikely to be a reasonable suspicion.
This is good news for human rights in the UK, including us specifically as photographers, and a triumph for the people who originally brought the case in front of the courts. < http://photographernotaterrorist.org/ > < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/10555430.stm > It's still illegal under Section 72 to "elicit information about a police officer". They use this to try and stop people photographing cops. Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
