Protester loses legal battle to get off ‘extremism’ database

The Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned a ruling in favour of 91-year-old campaigner John Catt whose peaceful activities at demonstrations were logged and stored in police records on domestic extremists.

Mr Catt, who has no criminal record, discovered his presence at various human rights protests had been recorded 66 times in a four year period, mostly about his clothes and his sketches of demonstrations.

Appeal

The Court of Appeal ruled it was unlawful to store the information on the grounds it was an invasion of Mr Catt’s privacy. He was one of 26,000 names on the database at one time along with other campaigners such Baroness Jenny Jones of the Green Party.

But police say that number’s been whittled down to around 2,000 in recent years.

On Wednesday, the most senior judges in the land threw out the previous judgement saying protesters have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when they take part in public demonstrations and police are only doing what they expected to do when taking notes and photographs of demonstrations where there’s a risk of criminality or disorder.

Watch below our Channel 4 News report from 2013 after appeal judges ordered police to erase his details from the database.