A civil liberties group has just won an important victory over the Information Commissioner, the Home Office, and five police forces. The Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) took the case to challenge a freedom of information request refusal. Netpol wanted to know how many anti-fracking protesters had been referred to the Channel programme. (Channel is part of the government’s controversial Prevent counter-terrorism strategy [pdf] to stop extremism. The strategy was described in a 2017 UN Human Rights Council report as “inherently flawed”.) Read more