Activists’ arrests must be reviewed after government drops anti-protest law
Original article by Katy Watts republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
| Seiya Tanase/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Labour has quietly dropped legal fight over unlawful crackdown on protest. But what about those already arrested?
Two years ago, Suella Braverman made a law she had no power to make.
The then Conservative home secretary ignored normal parliamentary process to sneak unlawful anti-protest measures in by the back door.
Her new law fundamentally changed the threshold at which police could impose conditions on a protest in England and Wales. It went from anything that caused ‘serious disruption’ – itself a vague phrase that Braverman was asked to define but didn’t – to anything that caused ‘more than minor’ disruption.
Now, finally, those laws have been quashed. We at Liberty launched legal action against the government in June 2023, and five judges over two hearings have since agreed with us that the measures were unlawful and should never have been introduced in the first place.
This week, the Labour government quietly dropped its appeal over those court rulings. The law now reverts back to what it originally was. Police can no longer intervene in protests on trivial grounds, such as a person blocking the entrance to a hotel where a fossil fuel conference is taking place for a matter of minutes – an act for which Greta Thunberg was arrested and later acquitted.
At Liberty, we took action against these laws not just because they were undemocratic and unlawful, but because of the real human impact they had on protesters and non-protesters across the country.
Take Susan* for example, who was wrongly arrested in January. Susan had gone to a vigil for Palestine in the morning, but left to go for lunch. As she was on her way to the shops with friends, she asked the police which way to go, and they directed her back into the protest area. A few minutes later, Susan was caught up in a kettle as the area had conditions imposed on it under these laws.
Susan was arrested, held in custody first on a coach for three hours, and then in a cell for the rest of the 24-hour period that a person can be detained for without charge. She was unable to even call home to tell her son she wouldn’t be allowed home that evening until 10pm.
Eventually, Susan was told that no further action would be taken against her, as was the case for dozens of others who got caught up in this injustice. Despite this, there have been long-lasting effects. In her own words, this has had a huge impact on her mental health. She feels scared for her family’s safety. She has lost all optimism, when she did nothing wrong in the first place.
What makes Susan’s case even worse is that the legislation had already been ruled unlawful at the point she was arrested. Just a few months earlier, the Labour government had chosen to appeal the court’s original decision that the Conservatives acted unlawfully. This is despite Labour’s home secretary, Yvette Cooper, having vocally opposed these same laws when she was in opposition.
Now, the government has finally accepted defeat and has decided to drop its appeal. This is a huge victory for democracy and our right to protest.
It’s important to note that these laws are just one in a long line of anti-protest legislation introduced over the past few years to crack down on our rights to protest.
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Through successive government acts and rhetoric, the ways in which we can protest have been narrowed. Restrictions have been placed on how we protest, and even how noisy a protest can be. And as we’ve seen recently, the sentences given out to protesters have only got longer and harsher.
This cannot go on. We need a reset on the way protest is treated, because it is leading to situations like Susan’s, where vague laws are causing very real damage.
If we’ve learnt anything from our legal action, it is that justice is possible. But, as Susan’s experience shows, there is still further justice that needs to be gained.
These laws should never have been made, and so, quite clearly, every incident under them must be looked at. There has to be an urgent review of every arrest and conviction made under these regulations.
Original article by Katy Watts republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
