A lawyer representing Hamas is appealing after a court rejected a temporary injunction to prevent the contents of his mobile phone from being examined after he was stopped and questioned by police.
Fahad Ansari, the lawyer who filed the Hamas lawsuit against him Prohibition of a terrorist organization in the UKwas detained under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at Holyhead Port on 6 August 2025 following a family holiday in Ireland.
It is believed to be the first targeted use of Schedule 7 powers, which allow police to stop and question people and seize their electronic devices without the need to raise suspicion, against a legal practitioner.
During the stop, counter-terrorism officers seized Ansari's work phone and downloaded and copied its contents, which included confidential and legally protected client material accumulated over 15 years of practice.
The High Court has ordered a two-day hearing to be held in May 2026 to decide whether the police detention, confiscation and retention of a human rights lawyer's work mobile phone breaches public law.
Ansari is suing North Wales Police and the Home Office. Hugh Southey CC, representing Ansari, told a hearing last week that police were motivated by unlawful or irrelevant considerations in detaining him and confiscating his phone.
Southey said the police's handling of Ansari's work mobile phone violated both domestic procedural and fundamental human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, and that keeping sensitive data for 15 years was disproportionate in terms of the right to privacy and family life.
In today's world, Southey said, “ultimately, a search of a mobile phone is more sensitive than a search of a home,” and therefore there should be a very high threshold for seizing a phone.
In written submissions, he argued that copying and storing data from a lawyer's phone would deter people from seeking legal representation out of fear that their personal and confidential data would be obtained by the government through their lawyers' devices.
Georgina Woolf, representing the police, told the court it “cannot be right… for any lawyer to have an iron-clad defense to protect his electronic device from ever being searched”, which she said “is a consequence of the plaintiff's case”.
Ansari boycotted most of the hearings, which took place behind closed doors. He called the closed review process a “fundamentally unfair process”, saying he “cannot trust a system in which the British State's allegations and evidence are kept secret from me.”
Judge Chamberlain said: “The hearing must take place after the discovery process has been completed,” which he said could take “several months.” He ruled that the case would be heard at a “curtailed” hearing.
Ansari said in a statement after the hearing that he believed he was targeted because the state was interested in his client, Hamas. “It is deeply troubling that the court would be willing to jeopardize legal privilege based on an unproven and secret national security claim,” he said.
Ansari said he would seek to appeal the court's decision to refuse a temporary injunction to prevent inspection of his mobile phone.
