by Sunny Hundal

We reported earlier this week that the Met Police had abruptly decided to force a hosting company to take down the website Fit-Watch, which monitored activities of Forward Intelligence Teams.

Now the police action has been branded as ‘illegal’ by one human rights group, who say the move also violated freedom of speech.

Article 19, which campaign for free speech globally, have issued a statement calling the take-down of fitwatch.org.uk “illegal”.

They also call for the government to include in its upcoming Freedom Bill the requirement that any requests to remove websites by public bodies or private parties be approved by a judge.

The press release stated:

Under human rights law, any restrictions of free expression must be limited in scope. If there was only one illegal page, the law requires that only that page, rather than the entire website with its protected political speech, be removed. The site has been critical of police surveillance of lawful demonstrations for several years and hosted a wealth of materials and debates about police activities. Even the offending page contained legal advice and is not clearly a violation of any law.

By yesterday the FitWatch website was back up and loudly sticking up two fingers at heavy-handed police action.

A blog-post stated:

This was a real attempt to squash dissent and criticism of the police, as well as attempting to stifle common sense advice to protesters subject to a witch hunt by the right wing press. The solidarity given by so many people has ensured this hasn’t happened, and has shown we can fight back. Even if we were to be arrested and prosecuted now, we would still be grateful to CO11 for the amount of publicity they’ve generated for us. We’re back, and we’re stronger than ever.

The police action was also covered on BBC London News yesterday (from here, 11m 48s in).

On the Twitter account last night they posted:

We’ve had 10k+ hits to the site today. In the words of one anonymous fitwatcher, ‘fuck you police, we win!’ #fitwatch

Free speech advocates are nevertheless worried that the police may be encouraged to take similar action in the future to shut down more websites.