Protests are disruptive by design and extra police powers could threaten all our human rights
The police crackdown on the Clapham Common vigil in memory of Sarah Everard this weekend was a stark reminder that we all need human rights to ensure that the police both protect our lives when we are threatened and respect our rights to protest when things go wrong.
In recent years, human rights have been denigrated, sidelined and dismissed by politicians and press as a gravy train for “activist lawyers” but the right to protest, particularly now, is something we all need to take seriously before we lose it.
For now, the rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression are protected in the UK through the Human Rights Act. Under that law, they can both be limited, but any limitation must be necessary in a democratic society and proportionate to a stated aim.
The provisions on protest in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, however, could bring in very broad powers for politicians and the police to curb protest and silence voices they find uncomfortable. The Bill seeks to limit protests that would cause “serious disruption to the life of the community” or “serious disruption to the activities of an organisation which are carried out in the vicinity of the procession/assembly/one-person protest.”
What this means in practice will be up to the Home Secretary to define in secondary legislation. Leaving the decision of whether or not a protest is too disruptive in the hands of Priti Patel and the Home Secretaries who follow her, should disturb us all, particularly when the potential for challenging those decisions in the courts is itself under threat.
Disruption is at the heart of the right to protest, it is not just a right to politely wave banners by the side of the road and it is not just about young dreamers who don’t know how the world works.
In 2019, when a group of elderly Extinction Rebellion protestors glued themselves to the A20, blocking access to the port of Dover, the oldest protester arrested was 91. If they had stayed in their designated area waving banners and chanting for four hours as permitted by the police while holiday makers streamed by on their way to the Chunnel, their protest would not have been national news.
And if, in recent years, we have seen more and more disruptive protests, it is because more of us feel deeply worried about politicians and the international community failing to respond to existential concerns. When people take to the streets to protest, it isn’t because there is nothing much on TV, it’s because they feel passionately that something needs to change, and they are not being heard in the corridors of power. It is an outlet for frustration, as much as a demand to be listened to by those steering the ship.
The protests we have seen in the past five years on the streets of London have not been about niche issues. Climate change will affect us all, racism is a fundamental challenge to a functioning society, whether you have been on the receiving end of it or not, and, as the UN Women report released earlier last week shows, women’s rights to be free from harassment and discrimination and to feel safe in our communities, is an issue almost all women – half the population – have direct experience of.
Disruptive protest is not the only way to achieve change, but it is a part of the solution. Farhana Yamin, an international environmental lawyer spent over three decades working on international treaties to tackle climate change before gluing herself to the Shell building in 2019 having come to the conclusion that diplomacy, campaigning and lobbying for change were just not enough on their own.
The pandemic has been used as an excuse to restrict protests in the past year on public health grounds, but the provisions in the Bill will undermine our ability to protest long after lockdowns become the stuff of tales for our grandchildren.
Cressida Dick flagged Extinction Rebellion’s peaceful but highly disruptive tactics as the reason the police need new powers to curb protest. But in fifty years, as the true scale of issues such as climate change start to bite – how will our children judge us if we look the other way because really, it was all just a bit too inconvenient?