Is the Arrest of Tommy Robinson Lawful?

Is this week’s arrest of Tommy Robinson lawful? It is by no means obvious that it is.

He was arrested pursuant to Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, the text of which is set out below.[1] The basis of the arrest is that Tommy Robinson refused to give the police the PIN to his telephone.

The first thing to note is that Schedule 7 says nothing about PIN codes or passwords. And so it is not, per se, an offence to refuse to reveal a PIN.

The police do have a limited power to require a person to answer questions:

2(1) An examining officer may question a person to whom this paragraph applies for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling within section 40(1)(b).

It is persons who are or have been concerned in the commission preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism who fall within section 40(1)(b)[2]. Terrorists, in other words.

Here, it is hard to see that there is any suggestion that Tommy Robinson is a terrorist. He is in trouble with the law for sure at the moment, not for any reason related to terrorism, but because he refuses to back down on allegations that he has made, and repeated in a documentary Silenced, about an incident on a school playing field a while ago. The received analysis is that the white schoolboy was guilty of an unprovoked racist attack on a Syrian boy. Tommy Robinson’s analysis is that the Syrian boy is a nasty toerag who had threatened to rape the white boy’s 9 year old sister, and that there had been a concerted campaign to prevent the truth about the incident from being publicised. The High Court has ordered Tommy Robinson not to repeat his side of the story. You can form your own view about that, but obviously it has got nothing to do with terrorism. And no other ground has been suggested as to why the police might need to question Tommy Robinson about it. If there was some reason to suppose that the content of Tommy Robinson’s telephone might reveal whether he was or was not a terrorist, then the officer would have the right to ask the question, “What is the PIN for your telephone?”.[3] But otherwise? No.