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recent years’ high profile terrorism suspects would not have been covered by the profile used for
the German Rasterfahndung.29 This shows that profiles based on ethnicity, national origin or
religion are easy to evade. Terrorist groups have regularly proved their ability to adapt their
strategies, with the use of female and child suicide bombers, to avoid the stereotype of the male
terrorist as just one example.30 Thus, as law-enforcement specialists acknowledge, any kind of
terrorist profile based on physical characteristics can easily become self-defeating.31
53.
The Special Rapporteur observes that, accordingly, profiling practices based on ethnicity,
national origin and religion have proved to be largely unsuccessful. The German
Rasterfahndung did not result in a single criminal charge for terrorism-related offences.32
Instead, the few successes achieved by the German police forces in detecting alleged
Islamist terrorists were all due to traditional, intelligence-led methods.33 In the United Kingdom,
the widespread, and ethnically disproportionate, use of stop-and-search powers has produced
hardly any results. In 2003-2004, for example, 8,120 pedestrians were stopped under
section 44 (2) of the Terrorism Act 2000. Yet these stops led to only five arrests in connection
with terrorism - a “success” rate of 0.06 per cent. Incidentally, all of those arrested were white.34
Similarly, the disproportionate targeting of ethnic minorities for stops and document checks in
the Moscow metro system has proved to be ineffective in detecting and preventing serious
crime.35 Finally, in the United States, the strategy of mainly targeting immigrants of Middle
Eastern descent has not produced any significant results in the form of arrests or investigative
leads.36
29
See Privy Counsellor Review Committee, Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001
Review: Report, 18 December 2003, para. 88; R.S. Leiken, “Fair Game: Al Qaeda’s New
Soldiers”, The New Republic, 26 April 2004.
30
See, e.g. D.D. Zedalis, Female Suicide Bombers, Strategic Studies Institute (2004), available
at http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB408.pdf.
31
D. Leppard, “Watch for women and child bombers, says Met”, Sunday Times, 7 August 2005.
32
BVerfG, 1 BvR 518/02; see note 4 above, para. 10.
33
See, e.g. Hessischer Landtag, Kleine Anfrage des Abg. Hahn (FDP) vom 10.03.2004
betreffend Ergebnisse der Rasterfahndung und Antwort des Ministers des Innern und für Sport,
Drucksache 16/2042, 18 May 2004.
34
Home Office, supra, note 13, 2004 (2005), p. 35.
35
Open Society Justice Initiative and JURIX, see note 13 above, p. 34.
36
U.S. General Accounting Office, see note 6 above, pp. 6 and 16; Lawyers Committee for
Human Rights, Assessing the New Normal: Liberty and Security for the Post-September 11
United States, September 2003, p. 39.
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