High Court judges rule Priti Patel’s Home Office broke the law by seizing migrants’ mobile phones as they arrived in Dover
- Three asylum seekers have won a High Court challenge against Priti Patel
- The trio had their phones unlawfully taken from them after their arrests in 2020
- The Home Secretary has now admitted the migrant phone seizures were illegal
Three asylum seekers have won a legal challenge against the Home Secretary after she admitted their mobile phones were unlawfully seized under a blanket policy targeted at migrants crossing the Channel.
The trio were separately arrested after being intercepted at sea on small boats between April and September 2020 and saw their phones taken by officials at Tug Haven in Dover, Kent.
Data was unlawfully extracted from two of the devices, and the phones were not returned to the migrants for months.
Home Secretary Priti Patel (pictured) has admitted the phone seizures of migrants were illegal following a high court legal challenge from three migrants
The three asylum seekers (file photo) had their mobiles taken from them once they arrived in Dover, which a High Court has said ‘violated’ their human rights
The three asylum seekers – one of whom lawyers said was ‘a potential victim of trafficking’ – brought a High Court claim against Home Secretary Priti Patel challenging the lawfulness of the circumstances and policies under which they were searched.
Following a hearing in January, two judges ruled on Friday that their legal challenges had succeeded after ‘very significant concessions’ were made by Ms Patel.
Lord Justice Edis, sitting with Mr Justice Lane, said the Home Secretary ‘accepts that between April and November 2020, a blanket seizure policy of migrants’ mobile telephones was in operation at Tug Haven’.
They added: ‘She accepts that the blanket seizure policy meant that, during the times in question, the seizure of the mobile phones of the claimants was not in accordance with the law.’
The Home Secretary (pictured) apologised for her failure ‘to comply with her duty of candour’, having initially said there was no policy of taking mobile phones
The judges said that the seizure and retention of the asylum seekers’ phones ‘violated’ their right to family and private life under the European Convention of Human Rights.
Law firm Gold Jennings, which represented one of the ‘vulnerable’ asylum seekers, said they had not committed a crime and were left ‘unable to contact loved ones’ by the phone seizures, which also created ‘huge practical difficulties for them as they attempted to navigate a new country’.
In their ruling , the judges noted that there had been an ‘apparent failure’ by the Home Secretary – for which she had apologised – ‘to comply with her duty of candour’ when responding to the claims.
‘Her initial stance was that there was no policy of the kind which is now admitted, and which is also now admitted to have been unlawful,’ the judges said.
According to the Home Office, the origins of the blanket policy were unknown but appeared to have developed ‘organically’, judges said.
The department admitted that the now abandoned phone seizure policy was unlawful because of its ‘blanket’ nature and it being ‘unpublished’.
It also conceded that a version of the policy that required phones to be retained for a minimum of three months was unlawful and capable of a ‘disproportionate interference’ with human rights and data protection legislation.
The department further acknowledged that a practice of officers requiring migrants to provide their phone Pins was also unlawful.
Judges also concluded in their ruling that demands for Pins ‘without any lawful authority’ and ‘using a threat of prosecution for a non-existent offence to enforce the demand’ was a clear breach of the asylum seekers’ human rights.
They noted that the Home Secretary had referred herself to the Information Commissioner’s Office in July 2021, which they said was well placed to investigate data legislation breaches ‘both in respect of the risk to those whose data has been illegally treated in the past, and in respect of present policies which post-date the claims of the claimants’.
They said a further hearing should be held to decide the ‘consequence’ of the successful claims and to hear submissions on the issue of the Home Secretary’s ‘duty of candour’.
Lucie Audibert of Privacy International, which intervened in the case, said after the ruling: ‘It’s quite clear that the Home Office considered that asylum seekers arriving on UK shores did not have the same privacy rights as other people – it unashamedly granted itself unlawful powers to systematically seize and search their phones, even when they weren’t suspected of any crime.
‘This is in line with this Government’s, and many others’, efforts to criminalise migration and rob migrants of their basic human rights.’
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