Freedom to protest

Sections 132-8 of the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) introduced several measures that have interfered with the right to peacefully protest, including banning unauthorised protests within 1 km of parliament and placing restrictions on those that are authorised. This was widely viewed as a way of ousting the anti-Iraq war protester Brian Haw from his five-year ‘peace camp’ in Parliament Square. A High Court hearing in the same year ruled that SOCPA did not apply to Haw as his protest predated the legislation, but the Home Office won an appeal in 2006 that overturned this ruling. After further legal battling, Haw was allowed to stay but with various restrictions placed upon his protest, including limited use of his loudspeaker and a greatly reduced protest area. Maya Evans and Milan Rai were the first people to be convicted under SOCPA in 2005, for standing at the Cenotaph on Whitehall and reading out the names of UK soldiers and civilians killed in the war in Iraq. Two parliamentary committees (the Joint Committee on the Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill and the Joint Committee on Human Rights) have recommended that sections 132-8 of SOCPA be repealed, but at the time of writing the government has done nothing about this.

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