ABSTRACT
In the UK in the twenty-fi rst century the legal response to protest is changing. The terrorist acts of 9/11, the rise of terrorism thereafter and of awareness of terrorism, the Iraq war, have all had an impact. The deployment of criminal sanctions in 2006 to seek to rid Parliament Square of a lone, peaceful anti-war protester is only the most obvious manifestation of this change. Since the main statutory framework governing protest was put in place in 1986 and extended in 1994 under the Conservative government, there has been, this chapter will argue, a continued creeping criminalisation, and even terrorisation, of many forms of dissent over the ten years of Labour rule since 1997. The over-broad provisions introduced in 1986 and 1994 have been extended incrementally
in a range of statutes that, on their face, are not concerned mainly with public order, such as the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003. Accompanying incrementally increasing criminalisation of forms of dissent, there has recently been a more worrying trend – to use sanctions based on the civil standard of proof against protesters. For most of those ten years the Human Rights Act has also been in force – an intriguing contradiction that forms one of the main themes of this chapter. But in exploring the contradictions in recent UK civil rights statutory policy, it must be remembered that the common law doctrine of breach of the peace overshadows all the statutory changes over the last ten years. Breathtakingly broad, bewilderingly imprecise in scope, it provides the police with such wide powers to use against protesters as to render the statutory frameworks almost redundant.
