British national Dawn Sturgess died in 2018 from alleged poisoning by the ‘Novichok' nerve agent four months after the attack on former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal. Russia has denied any involvement in the poisoning, and Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov have maintained they were civilians who came to Salisbury as tourists.
The UK Border Force, police and MI5 has been given new powers to stop, search and detain people suspected of being engaged in “hostile state activity.”
Home Secretary Priti Patel said on Thursday, 13 August: “The threat posed to the UK from hostile state activity is growing and ever changing. These new powers send a very clear message to those involved in it that this government has zero tolerance for those acting against British interests.”
The House of Commons and House of Lords' Joint Committee on Human Rights, in scrutinising the new powers, said: “The definition of ‘hostile act' is extremely wide and there is no threshold test required before a person is detained and examined. Individual officers could simply act on a ‘hunch'. This is not in itself inadequate, but it is nevertheless troubling given the breadth of the power.”
Ms Patel made no mention of another aspect of the new measures – the power to seize and make copies of materials including “journalistic, legally privileged, human tissue and commercial material held in confidence”.
In 2013 Guardian journalist Glenn…
