Chamber of Advocates call for guidelines on police strip-searches to be publicised

The Chamber of Advocates has stated its concern about strip-searches of individuals taken in for questioning by the Police, after Sliema councillor Martin Debono was stripped naked during a police interrogation at the Floriana depot.

Chamber president Dr Reuben Balzan said strip searches had to be conducted in situations that justified such an invasion of privacy under the law. He also questioned the refusal by the Police to publish the guidelines on strip-searches given to members of the force.

The Chamber has also called on the police to publish its guidelines on strip-searching.

“The issue of searches generally is regulated by law. Both the Criminal Code and the Police Act grant to the Police the right to carry out searches,” Balzan noted.

Section 355 of the Criminal Code provides that a police officer may immediately search an arrested person, if there are reasonable grounds for believing the person “may present a danger to himself or others”; to search for anything which the arrested person might use to assist him to escape from custody; or for anything which might be evidence related to an offence.

Similar wording is found in Section 65(2) of the Police Act which deals with the powers of the Custody Officer assigned to the arrested person. The Custody Officer, in fact, is the person on whom the law places the obligation to ensure that the rights of an arrested person are respected.

“The Chamber notes that the exercise of the powers of search rests on the individual discretion of the officer concerned. Court judgments have sought to establish that in establishing whether the suspicion on which the decision to search was reasonable or not the test to be adopted is an objective one,” Balzan said.

“However, in practice, and at the time when the search is carried out, deciding what amounts to ‘reasonable suspicion’ depends very much on the subjective understanding of the situation on the part of the officer vested with the power to search.”

In these circumstances, the Chamber said that the publication of the guidelines would give appropriate publicity to the rights of all concerned and help lawyers in giving advice when faced with a person who alleges that a search was carried out abusively. “While appreciating the need for the Executive Police to have all the necessary legal mechanisms to investigate crime, the Chamber maintains that this ought not to take place at the expense of the individual's right to personal dignity.”