British police and prosecutors are relying on a recently adopted “speech crime” provision in terrorism legislation to target journalists, commentators, activists, and protesters.
The crackdown accelerated after Israel launched its genocidal campaign against Palestinians following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Among the most well-known examples of this crackdown is the case of British-Syrian journalist and commentator Richard Medhurst.
Medhurst, the son of two United Nations peacekeepers, was arrested on August 15 by counter-terrorism police after his plane landed at London’s Heathrow airport. He was due to participate in a panel at the Better Days Festival in Devon.
“Something in my gut told me something was up,” Medhurst told The Dissenter, because there was an “unusually long gap” after the plane stopped and the doors opened.
The pilot said that they were waiting for a plane to move out of their spot, but this turned out to be false. “One of the flight attendants said, ‘can Richard Medhurst please come to the front of the plane?’ I was literally in the front row.”
Officers, who were not in uniform, initially refused to answer any questions as to who they were and what they wanted and declined to identify themselves. Police demanded to know where Medhurst’s bags were and then took him and his property away. After he was taken to a small room, he was searched, placed in double-lock handcuffs in a painful manner, and transferred to a police station.
Medhurst, who is a member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) as well as the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), is well-known for his coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition case as well as his reporting on geopolitics as it relates to West Asia.
This is the first known example of British authorities invoking section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 to justify arresting and interrogating a journalist, which was passed in 2019 as part of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act.
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