Boris Johnson’s government is introducing changes to policing, surveillance, and judicial review that will make human rights violations more likely to occur and less likely to be sanctioned. As UN special rapporteur, David Boyd, said: “These three pieces of legislation are shrinking civic space at a time when the global environment demands that people’s voices be heard”.
The Policing Bill
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is a piece of legislation that includes significant government proposals on crime and justice in England and Wales. A particularly important part of the bill covers changes to protests.
Currently, the police have to show that a protest will result in “serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community” to place restrictions. In the case of major events, details are usually discussed with organisers in advance.
Under the new bill, police will be able to enforce stricter conditions on static protests such as start and finish times and noise limits. Furthermore, a section introduces the new statutory offence of “intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance”. This means that a person can be liable to be imprisoned for up to ten years if convicted of “serious annoyance” or “serious inconvenience”.
Other shocking sections of the bill include similarly high sentences imposed on those convicted of causing damage to statues and memorials. It can be presumed that this is a response to the tearing down of slave trader Colston’s statue in Bristol by Black Lives Matter protestors.
Labour MP, Peter Kyle, importantly points out that an “angry mob” that throws a statue into a harbour “and then turns around and throws a woman or child into the water” would be punished more harshly for the first offence than that against a living person. The possible ten years imprisonment is double the length of the maximum sentence for assault causing actual bodily harm.
The 300-page document is filled with changes to various aspects of justice. But, this bill threatens the human rights of the public by restricting the right to protest so much that even a single individual peacefully holding up a sign could be penalised for breaching conditions they “ought to have known”.
The Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill
This piece of legislation amends Part II of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to allow public bodies to authorise covert human intelligence sources to engage in criminal activities (including rape, murder, and torture) with immunity from punishment.
Passing this bill would approve serious violations of the European Convention on Human Rights, and set itself apart from international human rights standards.
Judicial Review
“Judicial review is a type of court proceeding in which a judge reviews the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body.” Fundamentally, these reviews are a challenge to the way a decision has been made by public bodies such as local councils, government departments, police forces, or health authorities.
The former supreme court justice Lord Sumption claimed that there is evidence of excessive and inappropriate use of judicial review to overturn government decisions.
However, Gina miller, legal campaigner and winner of a Supreme court battle against the government said she is concerned about proposals to restrict judicial review. She argues “there needs to be an increase [of legal scrutiny of government decisions]” to uphold social justice.
The Right to Peaceful Protest Jeopardised
These three pieces of legislation attack peoples’ rights to protest -threatening democracy. Furthermore, Boyd emphasises that “one of the fundamental rights in jeopardy is access to justice and changes to judicial review are a threat to that basic right”.
His comments followed the campaign group, Not1More’s, plead to the UN urging intervention to protect the rights of peaceful protesters in the UK. The London-based group highlighted that all three of these pieces of legislation would make “people who wish to access their democratic right to peaceful protest more vulnerable to undue restrictions, arbitrary detention and/or invasive policing”.
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