How a 94-year-old war veteran ever ended up on the National Domestic Extremism Database is quite revealing. How he got off it again is quite a story.
John Catt’s long life of protest began in Sussex in World War Two, when he was a 14-year-old farmworker. On behalf of his workmates, grown men, he stood up to a “tyrant” of a boss over unpaid wages – and won. Later, serving in the RAF, he was confined to barracks for a month for protesting about unsanitary conditions in the sick bay.
Nearly seventy years later, Catt told an interviewer that that incident was when “the authorities” first took an interest in him. Sounds a bit paranoid – until you discover that well into the 21st century, those same authorities were indeed still fascinated by the minutiae of John’s life.
They’d need a big file: Catt first attended a peace protest in 1948. Over the decades he protested against the USA’s war on Vietnam, nuclear weapons, New Labour, police racism, the poll tax … if you, your parents or your grandparents remember a left-wing cause any time between the 1940s and the 2010s, you can be fairly sure John Catt was there.
But what triggered the process that ended with him making legal history was his involvement with the “Smash EDO” demos in Moulsecoomb, Brighton, in the 2000s, against a factory manufacturing parts for bombers which Israel was using against civilian targets in Gaza and the West Bank. This was when Catt was first placed on the National Domestic Extremism Database – which, if it was happening abroad, we would call “a list of dissidents who the secret police are keeping an eye on.”
In 2010 John discovered, via the Data Protection Act, that the police’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit had recorded 66 items concerning his activities. This was, remember, an octogenarian who had never been convicted of a criminal offence, nor suspected, even informally, of involvement in any violent activity.
Noting that the information recorded included such vital matters of national security as whether he was shaven or unshaven, and whether or not he had his sketchbook with him (he usually did, being a lifelong art lover), John Catt formally requested that the police delete their files on him. The police refused, and declined to give a reason. Catt initiated a judicial review against the decision; in 2012 the High Court found against him; in 2014, the Court of Appeal backed Catt, but in 2015 the Supreme Court favoured the police.
Finally, on the 24th January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights found unanimously in John Catt’s favour: all citizens have a right to a “private and family life,” and keeping records indefinitely on a person who had only ever been engaged in the “peaceful exercise” of rights protected by law was itself clearly unlawful. Catt’s case established that governments cannot designate people as “extremists” simply because they disagree with them. His daughter, who often joined him on peace demos, told reporters "He's been a rebel all his life and he will be to his last days.”
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Sources:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-13297057
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-46984481
www.theargus.co.uk/news/17382511.john-catt-94-wins-battle-police-extremism-database/
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-4dd3-a-dark-day-for-our-rights-1