The British government is giving the police the power to apply for an order restricting the freedom of anyone they suspect of being a potential sex offender.

The new powers will allow magistrates to grant the police a sexual risk order to prevent someone from contacting children or vulnerable people, travelling abroad, using the internet, etc. based on nothing but a suspicion of their potential to be a sex offender.  The subject of a sexual risk order doesn’t need to be convicted to have the order made against them and the criteria for granting the order are lower than existing sexual harm orders.

Sex offenders obviously need to be tracked down and dealt with but if there isn’t enough evidence to convict someone of sex offences then they shouldn’t have one of these orders made against them.  Restricting someone’s freedoms because the police have a suspicion that they have the potential to commit sex offences is something that could have been lifted from Orwell’s 1984.