Defend our right to protest

The campaign

We campaigned against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The Bill weakens our right to protest by giving the police the power to limit any protest deemed ‘a nuisance’ or ‘noisy’.

The Bill also creates an offence where protesters can be jailed for up to 10 years for ‘causing serious annoyance.’ This means protesters can be criminalised for exercising their democratic rights. This stifles protest by discouraging people from taking part.

We opposed the Bill because the right to protest is a fundamental part of modern democracy, and history shows us that protests can inspire major societal change.

Our aim was to get the Government to scrap the clauses of the Bill that are unjustified interferences with the right to protest.

What did we deliver?

We teamed up with over 250 organisations to sign an open letter to the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Justice expressing concern about the Bill’s interference with the right to protest.

Hundreds of our supporters wrote to their MP asking them to stick up for human rights and freedoms by opposing the Bill.

We engaged with former senior police officers who were concerned about the Bill. We encouraged them to write to the Home Secretary asking her to meet with them and reconsider the measures within Part 3 and Part 4 of the Bill which endanger our democratic values.

We encouraged the Labour Party members on our email list to write to the Shadow Home Secretary asking her to tell Labour peers to oppose the dangerous parts of the Bill and back amendments that strengthened protest rights.

Campaigning from across civil society convinced the Lords to oppose different aspects of the Bill. The Lords defeated the Government on fourteen amendments to the anti-protest Bill.

The Government was able to reverse many of these defeats in the House of Commons. But some of the most draconian measures were permanently removed from the Bill because the Government had added extra clauses to it after it had passed through the Commons. This included the new ‘locking on’ offence and giving the police power to stop and search protestors without a reason.

The Bill is now an Act of Parliament.

What’s next?

We will continue to draw attention to the importance of our internationally recognised right to protest.  We will lobby opposition parties to reverse the draconian measures in this Act.

The Government’s new Public Order Bill reintroduces some of the clauses that the Lords defeated in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. We will be supporting organisations such as Liberty in their campaign against the Public Order Bill.