Met police defend covert seizing of Sun reporters' phone records over Plebgate
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Version 0 of 1. Metropolitan police officers have defended their decision to secretly obtain Sun journalists’ phone records in a bid to identify the police officer who leaked details of the Plebgate incident. The force has been taken to court by News Group Newspapers (NGN) and three of its journalists who claim that its decision to use “coercive legal powers” normally reserved for criminals and counter-terrorism operations to intercept their communications was “incomprehensible”. On the first day of the investigatory powers tribunal in central London on Monday, Gavin Millar QC for the complainants suggested DCI Tim Neligan, who led the search for the mole, should have asked NGN directly for more information short of naming the source, which it had already refused to do. Failing that, Millar said Neligan should have applied to a judge to obtain the phone records under procedures established in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 rather than using the Regulation and Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which enabled the police to obtain records covertly through mobile phone companies. Neligan replied: “We were concerned that whoever that person was (responsible for the leak), we didn’t want them to be alerted to anything we were doing in terms of an arrest.” He said it was his job to “maximise the evidential opportunity”, which necessitated moving quickly to ensure any potential searches would not be compromised. “We were not in the business of signposting what our next move would be,” he said. “I don’t think that would be helpful.” He said Ripa was used because it was the appropriate legislation for a “serious crime”. Police studied a week’s worth of the phone records of the Sun’s political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, and two other reporters, Anthony France and Craig Woodhouse, in its attempts to discover who leaked the claim that then cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell called police officers “plebs” when leaving Downing Street on 19 September 2012. The incident led to Mitchell’s resignation. The Met used GPRS data to locate the three reporters’ whereabouts over the period their communications were scrutinised and also obtained records for two newsdesk landlines for an hour and a half. Another witness, DS Paul Hudson, who was responsible for deciding whether the Ripa requests should be granted, told the tribunal he was not aware of a journalist’s right to protect his sources. He had written at the time that journalistic privilege – the protection of reporters’ sources – “does not apply” with respect to the complainants, the tribunal heard. The complainants are seeking a public judgment by the tribunal on the “manifest incompatibility of the actions taken by the police with the complainants’ ECHR (European convention of human rights) article 10 rights”. They argue that the police did not demonstrate that what they did was “necessary in a democratic society” in the meaning of article 10, which protects journalistic sources. The case, the first of its kind, is being presided over by a panel of five senior legal figures, including two high court judges. |