ABSTRACT
Take a random day. 30 March 2011. The day I started writing this chapter. Take a random newspaper on that random day. The one that is delivered to my home six days a week. According to The Guardian on that day, there were at least five significant human rights stories worthy of reporting. The first was the inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson, the news vendor who died after an altercation with a police officer, named in The Guardian as PC Simon Harwood. 1 The second was a report about the mass arrest of UK Uncut protestors who had visited Fortnum and Mason during the great TUC march and rally against the cuts on the previous Saturday. The young protestors involved were arrested for aggravated trespass, some of them spending up to 24 hours in custody. The third story was a claim that the Home Office was about to introduce even further controls on political protest, responding to right-wing demands for further restraint. This is despite caution being expressed by a prominent Tory backbencher about introducing yet further controls on freedom of assembly. The fourth was growing concern about so-called super-injunctions, the cover of which is broken only by parliamentary privilege. And the fifth was the ongoing drama of phone hacking by the Murdoch press (a State within a State?). Human Rights Act? ‘You’re having a laugh,’ as they might say on the pages of Rupert’s most common title.
