Lord Stevens, former commissioner of the Metropolitan police, has told the Leveson Inquiry that he “had to get out” of a contract involving writing columns for the News of the World.
“The whole thing just didn’t seem right to me,” Stevens said. He noted that he decided to terminate his contract with the paper — which involved his writing several pieces over a two-year period following his autobiography being serialised in the tabloid — some months after the convictions of royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire of phone hacking.
He said he was paid £5,000 for the two articles he penned for the paper.
He told Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC he had also heard further information about “unethical behaviour” at the now-defunct tabloid, which he later clarified as “general behaviour”.
Elsewhere in his testimony, he said that as commissioner he would have been “quite ruthless” in pursuing issues related to phone hacking later raised by the Guardian. “I’d have gone on and done it,” he said. “That’s what police officers are paid to do, to enforce the law.”
Also appearing today was chief constable of Surrey police and former Met office Lynne Owens. Quizzed over whether her approach of only meeting journalists at New Scotland Yard rather than in a social setting was “austere”, Owens said she felt it was “entirely appropriate”.
She also told the Inquiry she found it “abhorrent” that a police officer could leak information about celebrities when they appear at police stations. “I don’t think people who behave like that should be in the police service,” she said.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with further evidence from former Metropolitan police staff, including former commissioner Lord Blair.
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Two protest rallies were held in the centre of Moscow claimed Vladimir Putin stole the Russian presidential election. The fact that the major protest was sanctioned by Moscow authorities didn’t prevent the police from arresting hundreds of people in an enormous security operation that saw thousands of police officers and soldiers flood the centre of the capital.
The sanctioned rally – on Pushkinskaya Square – gathered 15-20,000 people. Protesters demanded new and fair presidential and parliamentary elections, and repeated the requests of previous mass protests: immediate release of political prisoners, registration of opposition parties, the resignation and investigation of head of Central Election Commission Vladimir Churov and new democratic election laws.
Although President Medvedev proposed simplifying the registration process for political parties and restoring citizens’ rights to elect governors and mayors, opposition leaders remain sceptical, especially as the bill is vague and would not come into force for a couple of years. The Duma is due to pass the legislation after Putin takes presidential office, and opposition activists believe he might want to cancel the political reform.
People at Pushkinskaya didn’t seem to trust neither Medvedev or Putin. “We are the power”, they chanted, “Russia without Putin” and “A thief must be in prison, not in Kremlin”. Supported by several hundred reporters, Left Front movement leader Sergey Udaltsov said from the stage that he would stay in the square “until Putin leaves”. Soon after the rally ended many key opposition leaders Alexey Navalny, Ilya Yashin and Udaltsov himself were arrested. Activist and Duma Deputy Advisor Alena Popova broke her arm after police pushed her to the ground.
The other rally was unsanctioned and held by Eduard Limonov, leader of opposition movement “The Other Russia” near the Central Election Commission building. The commission refused to register him as a presidential candidate and Limonov was arrested as soon as he arrived at the rally, along with many of his supporters. Another protest rally for fair elections was held in Saint-Petersburg, where 500 people out of 3000 participants were arrested.
Most people who were arrested were released after several hours, accused of breaking the law on rallies.
Prominent Bahraini human rights defender Abdulhadi Al Khawaja has been serving a life sentence since April 2011 for his involvement in anti-government protests last year. Al Khawaja has now been on hunger strike for 26 days. His daughter, Zainab Al Khawaja, also a human rights activist, writes about her imprisoned father.
When my father started his current hunger strike, he was already weakened as he had just ended a seven-day hunger strike 48 hours before. On the 10th day of this hunger strike my father was taken to the hospital, having collapsed in prison. He was taken back to the hospital on day 13, again on day 17 and again on day 24. Each time the doctor pleaded with him to just eat something, anything; each time my father refused, reiterating that he would only leave the prison free or dead.
That previous seven-day strike, undertaken with his 13 co-defendants/co-inmates, was made to protest the ongoing imprisonment of those who had taken to the streets last February and March and were being punished for demanding civil liberties and democracy. For my father, it was personal as much as political — his younger brother was sitting in the same prison as him. His two sons-in-law were arrested with him and also subjected to torture. His wife was fired from her job of 10 years by order of the Ministry of Interior.
My father is not a fanatic; or rather he is only a fanatic when it comes to believing that every person should have her or his basic human rights respected in full. He has worked his whole life for this principle, by documenting and reporting abuse, by training others to do the same, by working to effectively campaign for human rights, by speaking out against abuse and by joining with others to peacefully protest when rights are systemically trampled.
Abdulhadi Al Khawaja with his granddaughter, Jude
Following his arrest, my father refused to give up on the struggle for human rights; he continued his human rights work behind the walls of a military prison, at a site that is not found on any map. My father paid a high price for speaking out on several occasions in the military trial about the torture he and others were subjected to. When his two-month solitary confinement came to an end my father engaged in discussions in the prison, continuing to spread human rights education and the example of nonviolent protest. My father gave the other political prisoners a full course in human rights. He then asked the commander of the prison for paper so he could write certificates for his fellow inmates to document that they had completed a human rights education course.
When I was growing up with my sisters, and we were living outside Bahrain, my dad would talk about the day we would return and the kind of country we would one day live in — where all our rights would be respected, where we could live with dignity and freedom. We did return to Bahrain in 2001, but what we returned to was not my father’s dream. Though not the nightmare it has since become, it was clear even then that there were limits to individual rights and as a community, one group in Bahrain faced systemic discrimination. My father could not live with that, and so he did what he always did — he started working for human rights and opened the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.
Abdulhadi Al Khawaja with the current director of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, Nabeel Rajab
When the uprising in Bahrain started last 14 February, inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, my father quit his job with international human rights organisation Front Line Defenders and went to Pearl Roundabout to join the youth, who seemed all at once to have heard his message. This may have been the closest my father got to his dream, those days at Pearl, but now he is caught in the worst of nightmares. But even here he is teaching, leading by example and proving to be the most dangerous kind of men — the kind whose ideals cannot be shut away.
My father is Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja. He has been beaten, jailed, tortured, abused, sentenced to life in prison in a sham court trial, harassed, intimidated, had his family punished and seen friends and loved ones face harm. The last person who saw my father found him very thin, barely able to walk, stand or even sit up. But they also saw a sparkle in his eye. My father has spent his life struggling for others; he would rather die fighting the only way he can, than to ever give up on his dream. My father is Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, and he is on the 26th day of his hunger strike for freedom.
Zainab Al-Khawaja, daughter of Abdulhadi Al Khawaja, and known as @angryarabiya on Twitter, is a Bahraini activist. Like her father, she has been jailed for protesting. She is a dual Danish and Bahraini citizen
The former commissioner of the Metropolitan told the Leveson Inquiry today that too much closeness between the police and the media can lead to unethical behaviour, but warned against an “overreaction” to links between the two.
“Hospitality is the start of a grooming process that can lead to inappropriate or unethical behaviour,” Lord Condon said in his witness statement.
Condon said that every meeting with the press that involves hospitality should be able to pass the “blush test”, asking “Does this meeting feel right?” He added that a commissioner’s life would be “made difficult” if professional relationships crossed over into friendships. “It is not intrinsically wrong to be friendly,” Condon said, “but I knew where my comfort zone was.”
Yet Condon urged against turning the media into a “pariah”, warning Lord Justice Leveson of a “massive bureaucratic overreaction” if meetings between the press and police were restricted, or if a police officer who “was within 50 yards” of a journalist had to record it.
The Leveson Inquiry is currently in its second module, examining relations between the press and the police.
Condon, who was commissioner of the Met from 1993-2000, said at times his professional relationship with the media would “completely dominate” his life. He said there would be an “insatiable demand” for the commissioner to be communicating with the public and the media. He added later that the growth of officers blogging and using Twitter meant that the service nationwide needed to “re-calibrate” how it delivers information to the public.
He told the Inquiry he had also turned down offers of writing a newspaper column, stressing that he had spent his career “majoring on integrity, independence [and] being apolitical.”
He told the Inquiry held about eight to 12 meetings a year with editors, stressing that a commissioner should be without favourites in the press, and that he did not think he had invited anyone from the media to his home address.
Condon told Lord Justice Leveson that police discipline goes in a “cyclical” pattern of “scandal, inquiry, remedial action, relaxation, complacency, scandal.” He reiterated that the Inquiry’s challenge is to make changes that are “enduring”.
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