Judgment Approved by the court for handing down.
R (Bridges) -v- CC South Wales & ors
the event, because a person whose Article 8 rights are interfered with may never know
that the interference has taken place and should be put in a position where they are able
to mount an effective challenge. It seems to us that the answer to that point is that, in
the present context, as the Divisional Court found, SWP did all that could reasonably
be done to bring to the public’s attention that AFR Locate was being deployed at a
particular place at a particular time. As is common ground, AFR Locate was deployed
in an overt manner. In any event, Christian Institute was concerned with particular
legislation of the Scottish Parliament: what was said in that case cannot be taken out of
context as if it were a rule of general application set out in a statute.
71.
We must now turn to the decision of the Supreme Court in R (Catt) v Association of
Chief Police Officers. That decision formed the mainstay of the submissions for SWP
and the Secretary of State, as well as the reasoning of the Divisional Court.
72.
Catt concerned the collection, retention and use of personal data about an individual on
a database whose existence was not acknowledged to exist until the judicial review
proceedings in that case itself. The police maintained what was described as an
“extremism database”. The claimant had been a regular attender at peace movement
demonstrations since 1948. In 2005 he began participating in demonstrations of an
organisation called Smash EDO, a number of which involved serious disorder and
criminality. The applicant was arrested twice but never convicted of any offence.
When he made a request to the police under the DPA 1998, entries on the database
concerning protests at which he had taken part were disclosed to him.
73.
The database contained information about the claimant in the form of a single
photograph, subsequently destroyed, and written references to him in a number of
information reports on other people. In the majority of those reports all that was
recorded about the claimant was the fact of his presence at a protest and his date of birth
and address but some also described his appearance. The police undertook the
collection of the data on the basis of general common law powers.
74.
The retention and use of the data were regulated by the DPA 1998, by the 2005 Code
of Practice on the Management of Police Information issued by the Secretary of State
pursuant to section 39A of the Police Act 1996, and by the associated administrative
guidance. That framework of legal regulation was held by the Supreme Court to be
sufficient. The main judgment was given by Lord Sumption JSC (with whom Lord
Neuberger PSC agreed).
75.
At [1], Lord Sumption began his judgment with the following:
“This appeal is concerned with the systematic collection and
retention by police authorities of electronic data about
individuals. The issue in both cases is whether the practice of
the police governing retention is lawful …” (Emphasis added)
76.
We therefore reject Mr Squires’s submission that Catt was concerned only with the
retention of information and not with its collection.
77.
Lord Sumption went on to note, in the same paragraph, that a particular feature of the
data in that case was that they consisted entirely of records made of acts of the applicant