A lawyer who filed Hamas’s challenge to proscription claims he was unlawfully detained under the Terrorism Act, with his phone containing legally privileged information examined because of his client.
Fahad Ansari, who issued legal proceedings on Wednesday against the home secretary and the chief constable of north Wales police, was stopped by officers at the port of Holyhead on 6 August as he returned from a family holiday in Ireland with his wife and four children.
Ansari is challenging the decisions to detain and question him, seize his work mobile phone and retain and seek to examine a copy of the phone.
The grounds for judicial review, prepared by Jude Bunting KC, of Doughty Street Chambers, state that the use of powers under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, which allow offices to stop, question, search and detain a person at a port or border, “cannot be justified against a lawyer by reference to the fact that he has acted for a client of interest to the police or intelligence services in the past, or to obtain information about that client from the lawyer”.
Ansari said the bulk of the questioning was about Palestine Action, the group also recently proscribed under the Terrorism Act. He was asked about Hamas as well but refused to answer questions, citing client confidentiality. The following day, the contents of his phone were copied by the police.
“In the decade that I have been involved in national security cases, I have never heard of lawyers in England being targeted to this extent because of their clients,” said Ansari. “I have dealt with the usual media harassment for taking on clients who some consider to be controversial, including Hamas who my law firm represented in its application to be removed from the government’s list of banned groups.
“Some have complained that representing Hamas brings the profession into disrepute. Yet, what really undermines the integrity of the profession is when unpopular clients are unable to secure legal representation because of fear of public opprobrium and state intimidation.”
Ansari holds a consultant role at Duncan Lewis solicitors, having previously been director and principal solicitor at Riverway Law solicitors, which acted for Hamas pro bono so as not to breach sanctions. After the Hamas application was submitted, the shadow home secretary, Robert Jenrick, and the Campaign Against Antisemitism reported Ansari to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).
He said that in attempting to get his views on the proscription of Palestine Action, an interviewing officer said to him: “Many people, including my wife, think the ban is ludicrous.” Ansari said he was also asked about which A-levels he took and where he socialised.
As part of the claim, Ansari is seeking an urgent interim injunction prohibiting police from “examining, sifting, or sharing the copy of his work mobile telephone pending the resolution of this claim”. It says the phone’s contents are “overwhelmingly covered by legal privilege”.
Ansari said he was held by police for three hours during which he was fingerprinted, photographed and swabbed for DNA and told to remove his face ID and pin from his phone or face arrest.
Should the claim succeed, he has said he will seek damages for trespass to property, trespass to person and false imprisonment.
The Home Office and police did not respond to requests for comment. The Guardian understands that the police have said that they will not destroy the copy of the phone until it has been reviewed by independent counsel.
