Civil liberties

The lives of detainees in Australia’s immigration detention centres are controlled by a secret rating system that is opaque and often riddled with errors, a Guardian investigation has found.

Developed by Serco, the company tasked with running Australia’s immigration detention network, the Security Risk Assessment Tool – or SRAT – is meant to determine whether someone is low, medium, high or extreme risk for factors such as escape or violence.

Detainees are also rated for an overall placement and escort risk – which may determine how they are treated while being transported, such as whether they are placed in handcuffs and where they stay inside a detention centre – but aren’t given the opportunity to challenge their rating, and typically are not even told it exists.

Immigration insiders, advocates and former detainees have told Guardian Australia the SRAT and similar algorithmic tools used in Australia’s immigration system are “abusive” and “unscientific”. Multiple government reports have found that assessments can be littered with inaccuracies – with devastating consequences.

Ministers and civil servants will be banned from talking to or funding organisations that undermine “the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy”, under a new definition of extremism criticised by the government’s terror watchdog and Muslim community groups.

Michael Gove, the communities secretary, will tell MPs on Thursday that officials should consider whether a group maintains “public confidence in government” before working with it.

Groups that will be effectively cancelled by ministers for falling foul of the new definition will be named in the coming weeks, government sources said.

There will be no appeals process if a group is labelled as extremist, it is understood, and groups will instead be expected to challenge a ministerial decision in the courts.

Key Findings

• Referrals are stored within a national Prevent database, regardless of whether they meet the threshold to be reviewed by a Channel panel.
• Data is being held for a minimum of six years but can be kept for up to 100 years. The rationale for this minimum retention period is to consider the possibility of “re-offending” – even though Prevent referees have not in fact committed a crime. If there is no policing purpose for retaining data, this retention could be unlawful. Individuals are not necessarily informed that their data is being stored nor whether their data has been deleted after the six-year period or further retained.
• There appears to be a lack of oversight and parliamentary scrutiny over data sharing, processing and storage of Prevent referrals that are inappropriate for Channel interventions but which are managed by police-led partnerships. Once a case is managed by the police, national security exemptions can be applied to limit rights to rectification, access and removal. But the Intelligence and Security Committee does not deal with policing and the Independent reviewer of Terrorism Legislation does not oversee cases managed by police-led partnerships. This means that new counter terrorism capabilities are being built without Parliamentary oversight or legislative safeguards.
• The data of some Prevent referees is being shared with airports, ports and immigration services. This could explain reports that people who have been referred to Prevent have subsequently been questioned at ports and airports under schedule 7.
• It is very difficult for individuals to exercise their right to erasure and request data is removed because many will not know that they have been referred to Prevent. Even when they do know, the lack of transparency about data sharing makes it very difficult for individuals to find out all the different places that their data is being held.
   

Jacob Smith, from Rights and Security International, a human rights advocacy group, said: “For years, we have expressed concern about how the government’s broad concept of ‘extremism’ could be open to politicised abuses. It appears that this concern has now been realised through a blatant distinction between how the government wants to treat people on the ‘left’ versus people on the ‘right’ under Prevent.

“Our concern is only heightened by government rhetoric during the past few days that appears to be targeting British Muslims and protesters for Palestinian rights. If ‘extremism’ can mean anything the government wants it to mean, that’s a clear problem for democracy.”

Ilyas Nagdee, from Amnesty International, said: “This is yet another crackdown from the UK government to stifle freedom of expression – including political speech and activism – using the blunt instrument that is Prevent.

“Prevent is brazenly being used here to target political expression as it has long been criticised of doing. The government should not be in the business of rolling out training and guidance on what they deem acceptable or unacceptable political ideologies and forms of activism.”

Organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and protest groups such as Palestine Action are among those that could be affected by the non-statutory move to block groups from funding or accessing venues if they are regarded as promoting an ideology that undermines “British values”. The plan was reported by the Observer last year.

A minister said on Tuesday that he would not be happy if, for example, gender-critical feminists were labelled as extremists by a change of government policy.

The trade minister Greg Hands told Times Radio that the prime minister had talked about taking on extremism and the government needed to work on definitions.

“The communities secretary, Michael Gove, is doing that right now. More work is being done. But obviously we need to target real extremism and not just a difference of views, honestly held views about these things,” he added.

Long sentences handed to two Just Stop Oil protesters for scaling the M25 bridge over the Thames are a potential breach of international law and risk silencing public concerns about the environment, a UN expert has said.

In a strongly worded intervention, Ian Fry, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human rights, said he was “particularly concerned” about the sentences, which were “significantly more severe than previous sentences imposed for this type of offending in the past”.

He said: “I am gravely concerned about the potential flow-on effect that the severity of the sentences could have on civil society and the work of activists, expressing concerns about the triple planetary crisis and, in particular, the impacts of climate change on human rights and on future generations.”

Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition supporting a suspended Tube driver who led a chant of “free, free Palestine” on a London Underground train.

After around 100,000 protesters took part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in central London, footage posted online and then deleted by Open Democracy journalist Ruby Lott-Lavigna appeared to show the chant being led over the train’s speaker system.

After the uproar, the driver was quickly identified and suspended whilst TfL vowed to “fully investigate the incident in line with our policies and procedures”.

A petition started by passengers on the tube carriage called for TfL to reverse the suspension and uphold free speech has now hit nearly 70,000 signatures in just over 24 hours.