On 9 January, charges were dropped against Symon Hill, campaigns manager of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), in connection with his anti-royal protest on 11 September.
Coming across the proclamation of king Charles III in Central Oxford by chance, Symon shouted out: ‘Who elected him?’
He was arrested, taken to a police van, then de-arrested. In December, he was charged with ‘disorderly behaviour’, before having the charge dropped in January.
Symon is considering legal…
Zombies visited the Home Office on 29 November with a gravestone saying: ‘Public Order Bill – Stay Dead’. They were there to hand in a petition (organised by Greenpeace and Liberty) signed by over 300,000 people, calling on the home secretary to stop attacking the basic human right to peaceful protest.
That day, the Public Order bill was having its second reading in the House of Lords. It contains restrictions on protest that had been removed from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and…
In early August, the crown prosecution service (CPS) notified lawyers that it had dropped charges of breaching COVID lockdown rules against six people arrested during the Sarah Everard vigil on Clapham Common, London, on 13 March 2021.
The CPS said it was not in the public interest to proceed.
One of the six women, Dania Al-Obeid, is launching a legal action against the Metropolitan police over its policing of the vigil (she was handcuffed after arrest).
Dania signed a…
Four activists were arrested during the 10-day Trident Ploughshares/XR Peace ‘FABB’ (Faslane Action for Bomb Ban) Camp in Peaton Wood, in western Scotland in June.
On 13 June, one of the arrestees, Gillean Lawrence of XR Peace, was deprived of her heart medication for nine hours by police at Clydebank police station, and threatened with being held overnight without access to her medication. She has made a formal complaint.
Peaton Wood is very close to RNAD Coulport which stores…
The Police Bill received the royal assent on 28 April and thus became law as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022.
During its passage, the bill was twice returned to the commons by the house of lords with many amendments. The lords removed measures in the bill to give police new powers to: stop protests in England and Wales if they are deemed too noisy and disruptive (in the opinion of the police); impose conditions on protest on noise grounds; stop and search…
Since the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan police officer in March last year, the Met has been embroiled in a series of further scandals.
On 11 March, the high court ruled that the Met had breached the rights of four women organising a vigil in London for Sarah Everard last March. The police told the Reclaim These Streets organisers that they would face fines of £10,000 each and possible prosecution if they went ahead with the vigil.
The vigil went ahead in…
On 14 March, a young protester was cleared of riot but imprisoned for nine months for her part in ‘Kill the Bill’ protests outside a police station in Bristol on 21 March last year. Jasmine York (26) was convicted of arson because she had been filmed pushing a bin against a burning police car. She denied in court that she had been intending to add more fuel to the fire.
So far, 15 protesters have been sentenced to almost 60 years imprisonment for their part in the Bristol protest…
A day of action was held on 15 January against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (due to be voted on by the house of lords two days later). Thousands protested in Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Edinburgh, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Plymouth and Sheffield.
Shami Chakrabarti, the Labour peer and former director of Liberty, told a rally in Parliament Square in London that the anti-protest provisions ‘represent the greatest attack on peaceful dissent in living…
The policing of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow led to many breaches of human rights. These included: kettling (surrounding protesters as a form of temporary imprisonment), excessive force, racial discrimination, intrusive surveillance and intimidation and harassment of locals, protesters and independent legal observers.
Those are the findings of a new report, Respect or Repression, compiled by Netpol and the Article 11 Trust. The report is based on evidence from over…
The UK government is planning to bring in several new laws against nonviolent protest, including a new offence of ‘going equipped’ to lock-on.
Priti Patel, the home secretary, announced in her speech to the Tory party conference on 5 October that she would:
increase the maximum penalty for disrupting a motorway make a new crime of interfering with key infrastructure ‘such as roads, railways and our free press’ and give the police and courts ‘new powers to deal with the small…On 3 October, in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the police failed to close down Kate Wilson’s human rights claim about secret political policing.
Kate Wilson is a social and environmental justice campaigner who had a two-year intimate sexual relationship with undercover police officer Mark Kennedy.
The IPT panel ordered the police to provide a fully-pleaded defence, supported by witness evidence, within three months.
These rulings were a response to…
On 21 November, Scotland’s supreme civil court, the court of session, ruled that the UK and Scottish governments acted correctly in not extending the Undercover Policing Inquiry north of the border.
The judicial review was brought by Tilly Gifford, an activist who was herself targeted by the police for surveillance.
She said: ‘This is a massively disappointing decision by the court. Our evidence is clear and sound – there has been undercover policing in Scotland, and it…
The issue of undercover policing gained more attention in June because of a brave stand by Lush, the vegetarian/vegan cosmetics company. Then the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (COPS) and COPS Scotland held conferences in London and Glasgow on 7 July and 23 June, marking 50…
On 19 March, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (led until July 2017 by Christopher Pitchford) posted the previously-secret Special Demonstration Squad Tradecraft Manual on its website (see accompanying article for extracts). The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was a section of Special Branch, the British political police, devoted to undercover operations, which existed between 1968 and 2008.…
Dramatic developments in the #spycops scandal unfolded on 21 March, when people targeted by undercover police, their lawyer and their supporters walked out of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) being held at the high court in London.
Baroness Doreen Lawrence backed the walk-out, saying that the chair of the inquiry, sir John Mitting, was…
