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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 826-ii HOUSE OF LORDS House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE JOINT COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS
POLICING
MR JEREMY DEAR, MR ANDREW GAY and MR RICHARD D NORTH MR PHIL
McLEISH, MS LINDIS PERCY and MR Evidence heard in Public Questions 62 - 174
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Joint Committee on Human Rights on Members present: Mr Andrew Dismore, in the Chair
Memoranda submitted by National Union of Journalists, Huntingdon Life Sciences and Mr Richard D North
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Jeremy Dear, General Secretary, National Union of Journalists; Mr Andrew Gay, Marketing Director, Huntingdon Life Sciences; and Mr Richard D North, Fellow of the Social Affairs Unit, gave evidence. Q62 Chairman: Good afternoon everybody. This is the second evidence session in the Joint Committee on Human Rights' inquiry into policing and protest. We are having two sessions this afternoon. The first group of witnesses includes Jeremy Dear, who is the General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists; Andrew Gay, who is the Marketing Director of Huntingdon Life Sciences; and Richard North, who is a Fellow of the Social Affairs Unit. Do any of you want to say anything by way of preliminary remarks or shall we go straight into questioning? Okay, perhaps we could start with a question to Andrew, but the question is a general one to which the others may want to contribute. I think that you all recognise, to a greater or lesser extent, the value of protest. How do you think protest can fit into democratic society and what limits or restrictions should be placed on the right to protest? Mr Gay: Good afternoon everybody. I think the restriction on the right to protest is any illegal act should restrict that right to protest and the right to protest should also take into account the targets of that protest. There should be few absolute restrictions unless those could be broken or would be broken, so in that situation I entirely support the right of legal protest and continue to support that and have protested myself, but when that protest becomes aggressive, potentially violent and certainly intimidatory, then a line should be drawn and that should be stopped. Mr North: Obviously all the ordinary free speech lobbying and so on is fine and mass demonstrations are fine. I suspect that the core remark might be that almost all serious protest needs to be licensed on the street. I do not say that licences should be extremely easy to get but, oddly enough, I do not think there are many things that would be called protest which it would be perfectly possible to say would not be allowed for an ordinary citizen, and I am not sure why we should allow protesters what we would not allow the ordinary citizen. Then I go a bit further and think about licensing. I imagine that lots of protesters would say that in effect that is what they have to do now but I think it is worth saying it quite brutally like that because most protests will involve at least loitering, quite a lot of nuisance, quite a lot of inconvenience to one's fellow citizens, things that one would not be allowed as an individual, so when 30 people turn up and do it for a cause it does not wipe away the fact that they are still being a nuisance, they are still being an inconvenience, they are still loitering, they are still doing things that ordinary people would not be allowed to do, and I do not really see why they should not go through the process of asking for a licence for that bit of behaviour. The ease of getting that is another matter. Q63 Chairman: When you say in your memo "much protest attempts to trump representative democracy", what do you mean by that? Mr North: Almost all the protests that I imagine we are interested in here are protests about something that Parliament has decided and to that extent it is people who have failed to persuade Parliament, to put it brutally, finding another way --- Q64 Earl of Onslow: Or has not decided. You want to persuade Parliament to do something or to undo something? Mr North: Animal experimentation, hunting - you can run down the list of things about which people are routinely protesting and which are up for discussion and they are things that Parliament has actually decided after a lot of very careful discussion. If people were protesting about being excluded from Parliament on a franchise thing, historically there are all kinds of things that make a difference, but in our society we can say the kind of protests that we are interested in in a meeting like this would be protests about matters that, frankly, have been decided in Parliament. Almost always it seems to me the direct action or the protest takes the form of upstaging Parliament. That is kind of what it is about. It is saying ordinary democracy has failed; we will reach for this other thing. That is especially true of anything that you might call direct action or non-violent direct action. Mr Dear: I wonder how that relates to Brian Haw sat opposite here because Parliament did make some decisions about that that were challenged and I think the right to protest and the right to dissent should be protected as much as is possible in a democratic society. For any restrictions that are put on the right to peaceful protest the bar should be set incredibly high for those restrictions to be put, and even where restrictions are put there should be able to be a public interest argument just as there is in so many other cases about why those restrictions are wrong. Q65 Chairman: Building on what you said, one of the ways that people can bring to the attention of Parliament an issue is through protest. As the Earl of Onslow says, it may be because Parliament has not done something and they are trying to persuade Parliament to do something. It is a way of bringing it to our attention, surely? Mr North: That might be true in theory but in practice the issues which are being discussed are hugely well-aired. You might argue that protest does two things habitually: it shows a degree of passion which Parliament might not have noticed lies behind some wing of this argument; and in mass protest it can show a quantity of people when it is one million people on the street. We have got to be rather careful with passion. It is an overdone commodity and overstated in our world and not in any case ignored by Parliament when read in a letter to an MP. You do not have to shout it through a megaphone. Q66 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: I am just trying to understand exactly your evidence, Mr North. To take a practical example, where Parliament in three days and nights passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 which took away the right of 200,000 British Asians of East African origin to enter and live in their only country of citizenship. The debates were full, the law was passed with a commanding majority in both Houses, so the legislator had done its work. Are you saying then that because of that those who demonstrated saying that this was a gross act of racist oppression against a vulnerable minority should have fewer rights of protest because executive-controlled Parliament had spoken and decided the issue? Is that your evidence? Mr North: I do not remember the case and I do not remember the protest that it produced. Q67 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: The protest - if I can help you - Enoch Powell and Duncan Sands were on one side and the dockers were with them making strong protests against black and brown people being here at all, and on the other side there were people like me who were protesting that this was an unconscionable and arbitrary piece of legislation which should be resisted. You could take a more recent example and I only give that one because I remember it so clearly. What is your position then when you have got strong passions on both sides and the executive-controlled legislature does what the Government wants but what the Government wants happens to be in gross violation of fundamental rights, as held by the European Commission on Human rights subsequently? Mr North: In my world
out of the two chunks of things I have said today, you would have written a
note to Q68 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: What I am putting to you is something rather different. What I am putting to you is in John Stuart Mill terms a case where there was tyranny by the majority on a minority and where of course Parliament has done its job but what its job has amounted to is a tyranny in the name of the majority. Is that not then an important example where standing up for unpopular minority rights through protest is one of the keys to any democracy worthy of that name? Mr North: Yes I get it exactly and I take and share and have spouted plenty of times in my youth the kind of thing that you have said and it is a fair thing to say. I say that in the modern world in which we happen to live with the protest that happens to be going on, I would be a little more severe on quite a lot of the protest I see in front of me. I do not at all resist - in fact I rather approve - of the idea of people having to get permission to do it. Q69 Virendra Sharma: Given your own experiences of protests, do you think that an acceptable balance can be achieved between the rights of all those involved in protests (ie protesters' targets/victims, police, journalists) and the affected public? Mr Gay:
I think you can entirely if the protest
is legal. I think if protests are legal
and are peaceful then you start at a very different basis. Many of the protests that have been targeted
against myself and the company I have worked for for the last five years have
been associated with illegal acts, with harassment, and violence, so that is
slightly different. My experience is not
the norm, if I can put it like that.
Most protests in the Mr Dear: I think those who were arrested in Whitehall for reading out the names of the Iraqi War dead might have a different opinion of that and I am slightly worried by the distain that there is for the radical tradition of protest and in some cases civil disobedience amongst the right to protest. Certainly the poll tax was passed by Parliament and there were some very large demonstrations, there was civil disobedience, there were people taken through the courts but there was a means of protest that was generally recognised. Of course within that protest there were some people who stepped over legal lines and they were dealt with properly by the law. In terms of that balance, I obviously come from a slightly different position, as to whether you can balance the right of a protester and protestee. Representing the journalists who cover those protests, there is a third party if you like, in a lot of these situations whose rights are being infringed to a large extent, increasingly so, and that balance that is needed is not being achieved. We have an ever-growing dossier of complaints from journalists and photographers, ranging from physical attacks to intimidating surveillance, confiscation of equipment or data cards, denial of access, restrictions placed on photography in public places. If dissent is criminalised and even covering dissent is criminalised, just because a demonstration may be unlawful it does not mean that it is unlawful for a journalist to cover it, and what we are finding is that we are being caught up in the debate about whether this or that protest is legal. That is a matter for other people. The right of the journalist to cover that protest is enshrined in lots of different pieces of legislation but that is being infringed and I think it is important that we remember that when we talk about rights around protest. Q70 Chairman: You mentioned civil disobedience as being part of a long tradition but the long tradition I recall, certainly when I was a student, was if you got involved in civil disobedience, you got arrested, you were prosecuted and you paid your fine and that was it, that was the penalty for getting involved in civil disobedience and you knew what the consequences would be. Do you think that position has changed? Mr Dear: My view of it has not. My view is that is still legitimate civil disobedience and you pay the penalty for it. There are cases where you argue a public interest defence. For example, those who have broken into somewhere and then go to a court and argue a public interest defence. Some they win, some they lose, but they accept the consequences of their actions, and it seems to me the democratic part is drawing up what the consequences of those actions are. People then make informed decisions themselves about whether or not they believe something is so tyrannical that they have to act on their conscience and then pay the consequences for it. Q71 Earl of Onslow: Is it not interesting that we have had three really major demonstrations in the last ten years, the poll tax one, which in effect did cause I would suggest the downfall of Mrs Thatcher and it caused a change in the law even though the poll tax had been the key element of the 1987 Manifesto on which the Conservatives were elected, so that did change Parliament's mind; there were one million people who demonstrated against the Iraq War and Parliament paid not a blind bit of notice; and there was quite a lot of people, myself included, who demonstrated not once but twice to say, "Please, Parliament, do not pass such a silly Act of Parliament as the Hunting Act," and Parliament did. It seems very interesting the different effects that different demonstrations have upon Parliament and the legislative procedure. Mr Dear: Having spoken at two of those three demonstrations - and I will leave you to guess which one I was not at --- Q72 Dr Harris: Tally ho! Mr Dear: --- I was delighted at the outcome of the poll tax one and disturbed that one million people could march against the war and effectively be ignored by Parliament. However, that is an individual belief. I had a right to go out and protest there. I had a right, just as you did, and that is a right that I think we have to do everything possible to protect. Q73 Chairman: I think Richard wanted to come in there. Mr North: Only to say that those three protests were all perfectly legitimate so far as I have understood it, with the poll tax protest having a violent fringe. There is a fourth case you might say which was more peculiar where in the May Day riots, or whatever one calls them, it took a while for the police to get it across that there was a huge, perfectly legitimate, union-led anti-capitalism thing going on which anybody was entirely welcome to join, and it was big, and the other one that got the attention was illegal because the organisers refused to do any ordinary public order co-ordination with the police. It seems to me that mass demonstrations are the least of our problems. There is a long tradition of managing them perfectly well. They vary a bit according to the degree to which violent elements attach themselves to them but 90 per cent of them are uncontroversial. I would just say about the reading of the roll call and Mr Haw, the reading of the roll call of the dead in Whitehall, if that is what it was, I forget the details, is problematic, like the Fairford Coach incident is problematic, because whilst my position is that you might well need the powers to stop such things happening as the state you have got to be incredibly careful when you deploy them because their capacity to produce myths for the dissidents, as it were, is enormous, so the state has an interest in being careful in the use of what I think probably have to be in the background quite draconian powers. Q74 Virendra Sharma: What level of disruption do you consider to be acceptable in order that people can peacefully protest? Mr Gay: I think the level of disruption again depends entirely on the target of the protest. If the protest is legal and peaceful then there is disruption which is just blocking roads and things like that for a large protest. When it gets down to small protests and individualised protests and things like that, that level of disruption, again if it is focused on small organisations or single people, it can be harassment, it can be intimidation, it can be whatever, but I think at large protests there is bound to be disruption and that should be facilitated, absolutely, not necessarily facilitating the protest but facilitating the route of the protest or whatever. I have no problems with that whatsoever and I would support that entirely. When the focus of the protest is not against a piece legislation or is not against Parliament or is not against whatever, and the focus of protests gets much smaller and much more specific, such as the protests that have been directed at me, then certainly the rights of the protestee should be held much above the protestor. Mr North: My experience is nothing like as fierce as Andrew's but for a while I was interested in the harassing protest which was directed at a fur shop and I took it upon myself to put myself on the inside of that fur shop for several weeks. The police had the difficulty that the protest might have seemed rather low-scale, not many people doing not very much, but the fear that was induced was tremendous in the people on the receiving end of it, not least because they had no idea who might follow them home. That to some extent has been dealt with. The situation we are discussing now is much better from the protestee's point of view than it was about six or seven years ago, by which I mean that it is harder to bring vicious pressure to bear with the level of intimidation on people now than it was. Q75 Dr Harris: There is an interesting question about this threshold. I just wanted to ask a couple of questions, Richard. Firstly, you have made this distinction between protest and non-violent direct action and I was just wondering how your hierarchy worked because you like the idea of a hierarchy of violence, with threats of violence against people, harassment, and then damage to property as being perhaps on one side of a threshold but mere trespass, padlocking yourself or gluing yourself to a railing (which is more likely to damage you than the railing) on the other side, but you have not in your written evidence defined what you think is the direct action that you think would fall on the other side of this rights balance. Can I invite you to also address the point that you say that non-violent direct action aims to force change rather than to win arguments but actually would you not say, particularly if it is non-violent, that it is to gain publicity to win arguments. Often the Government has no problem getting things in the press and there is a power mismatch on publicity so non-violent direct action to get publicity is not trying to force change, is it, in the way you suggest? Mr North: The morphology of protest, which if I were an academic I would have worked up in a nice sophisticated way, is tricky because for instance what protesters have done in the way of damage to genetically modified trial crops is ordinary trespass and a bit of light damage and, ostensibly, it is not much damaging a crop. If it happens to be a research crop and you do two or three of them, you begin to make it arguable that that research operation has to stop. I use that example because it comes to mind to show why doing these morphologies is so difficult. Property damage is not a problem compared to damage to people, et cetera. These things tend to break down in the face of cases. Q76 Dr Harris: I am agreeing with you. Mr North: That is why I am not beautifully systematic about these things. Q77 Dr Harris: I am asking you if you would make a distinction between damage to property (and I would include crops and buildings as well) on the one hand, as one form of direct action, and trespass, padlocking or gluing yourself to things as another form of action as lower. Mr North: Lower/higher - padlocking yourself such that a motorway cannot get built strikes me as a really useless and irritating thing to do which costs the state a huge amount of money, there having been an inordinate amount of democratic agonising about whether the motorway should happen. It is all cost there. It looks jolly pretty. Elderly ladies remember their youth and go out with cups of tea and everybody feels good about it, except it costs hundreds of thousands of pounds and nothing is achieved. I think, frankly, there are better things to do with £100,000 than indulge these Leveller fantasies in people and I would be a little tougher with them because I care about the £100,000 and the waste of effort. I am extremely keen on protest and I am really rather down on direct action. I am almost as down on it when it has got the words "non-violent" written in front of it. It might be worth trying to say briefly why. Direct action is action and it is direct action and it is designed to force change. That is kind of in the meaning of the words and there are theatrics there because these people know they cannot force change and yet they are in a game of play-acting at the very least and sometimes more as though they could. Q78 Dr Harris: To get publicity. Mr North: It is not direct speaking, it is not clever speaking, it is not lovely argumentation; the words are direct action and what they play with is the charmingness they know they will be met with as they pretend to go out and force things. Q79 Dr Harris: Would you respond to my point that the theatrical, non-violent direct action I am talking about is that which is designed to get publicity where there is a mismatch in power with regard to publicity and it can serve a social good in a democracy because otherwise the powerful just steamroller through, so the motive is not to force change but to get publicity. Mr North: The getting of publicity for causes is great and there are lots of ways of doing but in none of the cases we are thinking about is there a great steamrollering state and these brave scruffily-clad peasants standing in front of the behemoth. Climate change, hunting, animal research - go through the list and they are controversies but there is not a state behemoth crushing the peasant. Q80 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: Some years ago I did a case for the Chief Constable of Sussex where animal welfare protesters were protesting about the export of live animals to the Continent and the Chief Constable had to balance the right of the protesters, who sometimes would themselves board lorries in order to stop the lorry or cut the brakes or do things of that kind, on the one hand, and the right of the exporters to export their goods alive and in circumstances where animal welfare people regarded the whole trade as perfectly deplorable. The Chief Constable had to balance these conflicting rights and interests using the principle of proportionality and the principles in the European Human Rights Convention, and the House of Lords basically upheld that approach. Is your approach different from that? Would you say because they are using direct action in running beside the lorries and trying to stop the lorries getting into the docks at Shoreham and so on that they should have been forbad altogether from doing it? Are you saying that the Chief Constable was right in allowing it to happen in a controlled way provided the principle of proportionality was observed? Mr North: I do not see that the Chief Constable had much choice but to balance the realities in front of him. Q81 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: He could have banned it altogether. Mr North: Now you will hear documentaries on the radio which are a little more worried than anything one heard at the time about the treatment of the people who were running the trade at the hands of the protesters. That is a narrative, if you like, which is emerging much more than it used to about what happens if you are on the receiving end of this passionate protest. I am not sure that politically anything very good came out of that protest. Q82 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: I am not asking that question; I am asking you a different question, which is so far as the law is concerned do you think that the balance which I have indicated to you, as approved by our Law Lords, between the rights of the protesters on the one hand and the rights of the exporters on the other, using the test of what is proportionate, was the correct approach or do you quarrel with the law as it stands? Mr North: I am very loath to quarrel with their Lordships when they get going, they are far too clever and experienced and wise, but I am inclined to think that that protest was allowed to go too far and I think that the liberal attitudes that assumed that that kind of protest really must be accommodated at all cost is not nearly as sound as people suppose, and I would not mind if we adjusted it. I can easily imagine that that cultural change, which I think we ought to have, could result in a legal change which would mean that that chief constable could have stopped that, yes, so I suppose I am on the illiberal side. Earl of Onslow: As I understand what happened the chief constable was given the discretion as to whether to act or not because he was balancing one of two protests. I thought I heard you say you agreed with that. As I am listening to what you are saying, and it is a view with which I have considerable sympathy, the chief constable actually took the wrong decision which is rather different from him having the right to take the decision. In other words, those people should have been stopped because what they were doing was extra-legal in that they were really harassing somebody else. Lord Lester of Herne Hill: Let me just explain because it was a case I was in. Q83 Earl of Onslow: This was the veal exporters. Was it not? Mr North: Yes, Shoreham. Q84 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: Let me be absolutely clear. What the case was actually about was whether EU law and European Convention law led to a conclusion that there could be no interference with the lorries of any kind because they had a right of property involving carrying on their business, or whether the right answer was to impose restrictions on the protesters that would allow the exports to take place but also allow the right to protest as well, and that is what they meant by the principle of proportionality. I am not sure whether you are saying you regard that as some kind of liberal attitude which should be changed or whether you say that is actually the right approach. Mr North: I was responding to you that on those two remarks I would say, yes, I think there is a strong case that that protest should have been bannable. Q85 Chairman: Andrew, you wanted to make a comment and then we will move on. Mr Gay: I will make a comment that there was the right to protest there and the protesters did protest, and the hauliers - whether you agreed with it or not - did manage to conduct their business. But I do think there is the context of that and one of the things that is important - Richard did make mention of this - is the context of that. Those hauliers were being targeted in their premises and at their homes at the same time and having to go through noisy, on occasions energetic picketing, when also those people who were energetically picketing were outside your house the night before and writing disgusting letters to you as well, puts a different context on it. It was not just a protest at the port; right or wrong, whether you like it or not, it is the context of the whole thing. These things do not occur in isolation and actually people should take a much broader context of how these things are being acted out and the real rationale that is being acted out. If it is for publicity, I have no problems with publicity, that is great, but if there is something else behind that publicity that is the real reason for things going on then it is a different matter entirely. Q86 Lord Bowness: Very quickly, on the latter part of the last question, we have heard a lot about the rights of protesters and a lot of the rights and considerations of the people who are being protested against; I would just be interested in actually having some comments on the record as to what your views are about how much the convenience of fellow citizens should be taken into account when policing protests, the ordinary members of the public who are not necessarily the target, they are not the protesters but they are stopped going about their lawful business. Mr Gay: When there are protests in Cambridgeshire, not necessarily at
Huntingdon Life Sciences - they could be in Huntingdon, could be in Q87 Lord Bowness: I am sure I would. I do not want to interrupt you, but how much of this should be a factor when you come to police the demonstration? Mr Gay: It should certainly be taken into account and the routes of protests should be limited to have as little effect on the public as possible. Mr North: The ordinary bystander convenience is not to be under-rated and should be taken into account very strongly. I think so the more because I do not think this class of protest that we are worrying about is as glamorous a feature of our lives as people suppose and going about one's shopping is. Q88 Baroness Stern: I would like to move on if we may to some more practical questions which will not be eliciting what you think so much as what you know about policing in practice. A question which is to all of you, although you do not all have to answer it of course, is there any difference between the way that police forces deal with protests across the country and in your experience are there some forces which demonstrate good practice? Mr Gay: Yes and yes. Do you want me to expand? Q89 Baroness Stern: Tell us a bit more. Mr Gay: Again, just in the context that I have experienced, when the animal rights protests kicked off in late 1999 at Huntingdon Life Sciences the local police force, the Cambridgeshire police force, had very few ideas about public disorder and how to manage these - which were intimidating, abusive, violent protests at the time, and that was occurring outside the company. Q90 Earl of Onslow: May I interrupt there? I was on the select committee that looked into vivisection about five or six years ago and heard some of the really unpleasant things that happened to you and it could be for the benefit of the Committee if some of those experiences were laid out. Before we went - this was before 9/11 - the chief of police who came to advise us on our own security said "These people are more dangerous than any terrorist we know" - this was post-IRA and pre-Islamic stuff. It would be useful for the Committee if you could tell us some of that. Mr Gay: I can wax lyrical or I can send you some information post this because otherwise it will take a lot of time but I can certainly send you information on the experiences of our organisation. At that stage the police did not know how to handle the protesters whatsoever even though there was learning in other police forces around the country because there had been similar protests in Oxfordshire before that with animal rights activists. But the police at that stage did not seem to learn from other police forces and they acted singly and in silos. What has happened in the last five or six years is that there is much better cross-boundary co-operation between police forces, there is the set-up of an organisation called NDET and NETCU who promote best practice within police forces; that is across boundaries and things and that is working very well to improve the coverage of protests. That is for the benefit of protesters as well as those people being protested against and so there is, if you want, best practice. There is still a way to go, it is by no means a level playing field, even within Cambridgeshire for instance which has had a lot of experience of this. Certainly, there are best practice ideas out there which are being communicated and so in general it is improving, but there is a long way to go. Mr Dear: In relation to the issues our members face there should be no
difference because the guidelines on police and media are the same across the
whole of the Q91 Chairman: When you say physical attacks on journalists, do you mean by the police or the protesters? Mr Dear: I mean by both. There are a
number of physical attacks which I have documented, some of which have resulted
in court cases where journalists have taken the police to court, whether it is
being charged by police horses or something else. Here is one from last week - this is a police
officer having kicked a photographer and this is the damage that was done to
that photographer's leg. I have got a
DVD of which I will supply copies to every member here that has pictures of
physical assaults by police officers on journalists - pushing them over, one of
them being hospitalised as a result of being pushed off the pavement in Q92 Baroness Stern: This question is just to Mr Dear because it is about the NUJ. I understand you recently wrote to the Home Secretary complaining about surveillance of journalists covering protests by the Metropolitan Police Forward Intelligence Team. Please could you give us some specific examples of where and when this has happened. Mr Dear: There is a whole number of examples and, again, some of them are contained on this DVD. Q93 Baroness Stern: Can we get them on the record? Mr Dear: The police say that they do not routinely take photographs of legitimate journalists - how the police decide who is a legitimate journalist or not I do not know because they are all carrying press cards recognised by the Association of Chief Police Officers - but they say if journalists are photographed it is "collateral damage"; that was the rather unfortunate phrase that they used. Q94 Baroness Stern: When did they use that? Mr Dear: This is the police saying if they do accidentally take pictures of journalists who are caught up in a public order situation it is collateral damage. Q95 Baroness Stern: This is when you negotiate with them. Mr Dear: Yes, we frequently have meetings with them to try to resolve these
issues. It is not collateral damage when
the police follow a car full of photographers, when they have already checked
all their details, to a local McDonald's several miles away from a protest
site; as they are filing their stories on their laptops from that the police
are standing outside the window filming them on video. It is not collateral damage at City Hall in Q96 Earl of Onslow: Do you think you will be locked up? Can we have a copy of the answer you got? Mr Dear: Yes, we have a copy of it here, I can make that available to you. Q97 Chairman: The full exchange of correspondence would be helpful. Mr Dear: I will make that available to the Committee. What we are seeing is a group of journalists who regularly cover protests being stopped and searched, way away from the protest, being photographed, having information recorded about what they are wearing, where they are going, who they are working for and so on, and it is creating an intimidatory atmosphere that means people are less likely to go out and cover protests. If we are all saying that publicity is one of the reasons for protest, actually what the police are doing here is undermining that freedom of the media and the ability of protesters to be able to get their message across via the media. So there are lots of different examples of it and it has become an increasing part of what the forward intelligence team are doing. We are putting in some Data Protection Act requests around a number of journalists who regularly cover these kind of events, whom we know have been filmed and we know that photographs and video exists of them, in order to try to find out some of the answers to the questions that are not being answered. One person has already done this, a Sky News journalist, and they get back a file that says at the top of it "Investigative journalists". If it is collateral damage and these are deleted and it is accidental, why are files being held on investigative journalists? We do not know the answer to that but we would like to know because it is acting as an intimidation of those who investigate a whole range of different issues and who cover protests. Q98 Chairman: These are files held by the police? Mr Dear: This one actually came via the Ministry of Defence and Metropolitan Police so this is somebody who has covered protests that were happening at the DCSI, at the arms fairs and so on who are then having files kept on them despite the fact that they have committed no crime; they are carrying out their lawful business as a journalist. The reasons for this are not clear and nobody is answering that question, despite the fact that we have been asking it for a long time. Q99 Mr Timpson: Conversely, looking at it from the journalists' perspective, where there may have been an uneventful protest and where you have had a dialogue with the police, you have managed to come to an agreement beforehand which has meant that the thing has passed peacefully from the journalists' point of view, is that the exception rather than the rule or is that something that is becoming more likely or less likely? Mr Dear: It is becoming less likely to be the case, but that does not mean that the demonstration has to be peaceful for it to go all right with the journalist. Demonstrations can turn violent but journalists are still able to do their job in covering that. What is increasingly becoming the norm is it is the kind of low-level intensity of it, the hand over the lens, the pushing you away, the moving you away so you cannot take a photograph of what is going on. A lot of these are things that individual photographers have sent into me and they literally say it is an almost weekly occurrence now when I am out photographing on the street. It is also the restrictions put on what you can and cannot photograph. I noted some down while I was sat outside: the London Eye - someone has been arrested for photographing the London Eye - if we arrested everybody who photographed the London Eye we would have to build an awful lot more prisons - traffic police, Brighton railway station, a traffic accident, an incident on Tyne Bridge and the switching-on of the Christmas lights in Ipswich. It has become so arbitrary and so commonplace now that actually these guidelines that we all agreed to - and we sat down for ages with the police to negotiate them - are useless because the police on the street do not know anything about them. In fact, I think the clerk of your Committee tried to access these guidelines on the ACPO website; they do not exist and she had to go to the NUJ website in order to be able to get hold of a copy of the guidelines. Q100 Chairman: Perhaps you could let us have a copy as well. Mr Dear: We certainly will do. Q101 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: Mr Dear, what you have just been saying I take extremely seriously and if factually it can be demonstrated I am sure you understand that the police service is in blatant breach of the European Human Rights Convention and the Human Rights Act because what they are doing is a gross interference with free speech and, plainly, has a chilling effect on investigative journalists who are the eyes and ears of the public. If that is right, what is the NUJ doing about that because you have a perfect right to take steps to protect the interests of journalists and, if necessary, to go to court. What are you doing about it? Mr Dear: Again, in this file is a letter from our union solicitors that says
the first thing you should do is meet with the Home Office and find out what
guidelines they are issuing to the police, meet with the police and put in the
Data Protection Act requests in order to find out what information is being
held - and this is part of a process we feel we are forced to go through now to
try and protect that ability of journalists to cover protests because, you are
right, it is having a chilling effect on people being prepared to go out and
cover these protests. The big problem is
an awful lot of legislation relies on individuals taking cases. These are individuals who already feel they
are being targeted and some of them do not want to stick their head further
above the parapet because when they go to Kingsnorth or when they go out on the
street in Q102 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: What I am putting to you is that the NUJ itself has standing to be able to deal with this if necessary. Are you taking steps to do so as a union? Mr Dear: Yes, we are, but what we would rather is that the Home Office were making sure that the police were abiding by the guidelines. Chairman: We will see what you have to say about that later on as well. The Earl of Onslow. Q103 Earl of Onslow: You suggested insufficient regard was given to using counter-terrorist powers against protesters targeting Huntingdon Life Sciences; can you explain what you mean by this? I was slightly alluding to that earlier on. Mr Gay: That really refers to a point at one stage, again at the excessive end of protest, direct action, whatever you want to call it. Certainly, the activities of the extremists could have been defined as terrorist in nature and certainly I think their aims were to terrorise and therefore to coerce people into changing what they were doing. Therefore, if that is what they were doing, could not stronger legislation be used against them and I think it limited the police's actions and activities, certainly before SOCPA became available, in that it limited their ways of investigating the extremists and what they were doing. In that situation, therefore, the police were limited in what they could do and what resources they could put against these people. Q104 Earl of Onslow: From what I can remember of it, it seemed to me that all the things that were described to us by your company in my previous existence were way outside the law and could have been pursued very happily had the cases been brought, even without any need for terrorism law at all. I also accept that the policeman did say to us "These people are the worst terrorists" - this was before 9/11. Mr Gay: I take your point entirely and truthfully that was exactly our argument, should we not be able to throw extra police and law enforcement support against that, but at that stage, early in 2000, 2001, 2002, these were still seen as separate acts, intimidatory acts, not seen as a campaign of action, with the occasional very serious act there. If that is not then intimidatory for anybody who could be a target, they were still seen as separate acts and not seen as a campaign of activism. Our proposal at the time and our legal advice was to try and adopt some of the terrorism legislation; it was certainly not allowed by either the CPS or the police at the time. Q105 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: A broad question to you all and then I will come to one about Huntingdon and the injunction afterwards. We know from Lord Scarman - the Red Lion Square disorders, the Brixton disorders - his analysis of the problems and the law reforms that took place as a result, and we know that there is a great wealth of criminal and civil law of all kinds available. To what extent does each of you consider that we need yet more law and if so what kind, or a change in police practice or what? A brief answer from each of you would be helpful because you all come from different points of view - perhaps we could start with Mr Dear. Mr Dear: I am not sure that a change in the law is necessary - there are laws there that protect the rights of journalists - but what we do need is a change in the enforcement of that law and the operation of the law, particularly by the police. There should be better training of the police, so in pre-event briefing and in their actual training they should be going through the guidelines and relations with media. Better enforcement of the guidelines - I do not know whether that is possible legally but certainly contractually it is quite possible, lots of other professions have guidelines and codes of conduct that are contractually enforceable. Also there has to be a clarification of the law on the issue of restrictions on photography because at the moment Jacqui Smith's answer says in local circumstances restrictions can be imposed by the local chief constable and 48 letters to 48 forces elicit 48 different responses as to in quite which circumstances those restrictions can be imposed. That is unsatisfactory for a professional journalist, knowing as they move around the country that different restrictions are being imposed on them arbitrarily by a chief constable in a particular area, so there needs to be a clarification of the law in that respect as well. Mr Gay: Current legislation does not need to be changed. We need to look at why and how the protests, then leading on into activism, are taking place and to see it in a broader context of what is happening. Within the current legislation of SOCPA and things like that we have the right legislation in place. We have already mentioned consistency across police forces and I think that is enormously important as well. The legislation in and around terrorism was looking at excesses that were occurring four or five years ago which have now been caught up with; I think at the time the activists and the extremists were getting away with things and doing more and more and that needed to be caught up. We are in a different period of time now and the current legislation is fine, as long as those caveats are taken into account. Mr North: Firstly I do think it is absolutely absurd that people can do damage to a power station or a crop and claim a lawful excuse; it seems to me completely absurd to claim that you need to damage a chimney and your defence is the damage of global warming for something which was designed to allow you to kick down your neighbour's door when his house was on fire. It is just a complete mismatch and quite absurd. I am worried that young people, protesters, people of protest mind, think they are living in a police state because they know of laws which as it were came in for counter-terrorism and such which are catching them. Therefore, in a rather illiberal way I would beg you to consider in what ways you could in fact tidy up the law in such a way as to make people feel very strongly that while simultaneously they had to get permission to do quite a lot of stuff and they had to behave themselves, and they would get into quite severe trouble if they did not behave themselves but the degree was understood, we did not think they were terrorists because they wanted to read out a list of names in Whitehall. I am no lawyer, I could not begin to do that, but I hope I have framed the task that I think is in front of you. Q106 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: I should have asked Mr Gay a specific question before coming to the injunction which is do you think any changes in the law are needed to deal with abuses via the internet? Mr Gay: Yes. Q107 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: What would you say? Mr Gay: The internet, as we all know, is a wonderful device but it also can be used to abuse, intimidate and terrorise people, especially when it gets down again to personal targeting. The difference is in the protests and the extremism that took place against myself and my organisation where these were not general protests against a piece of legislation or against Parliament or a large body, these became very specific, and why the protests I suppose became so successful in some ways was that they became personal. When things get personal it is very difficult to cope with, even at what people might consider to be a low level of activity, when it is continuous, it is insidious, it is enormously difficult to deal with. The internet just facilitates that enormously; it facilitates sending round details of the person, details of what to do, details of how to harass them, details of how to intimidate them, details of how to coerce them out of doing what they are doing. It is an incredibly powerful tool if used in the wrong hands and it is out there. Mr Dear: Can I just give you an example of that from our own experience, and that is Redwatch, which is an extreme right wing website run by the Blood and Honour Organisation and Combat 18 that specifically targets journalists in order to try and intimidate them. It uses the internet - it publishes home addresses, photos, ways of intimidating them. I had a visit at my house, we have got photographers who have had their windows put in and so on - those who photograph demonstrations of the BNP or Right-wing organisations. It is an incredibly powerful tool for intimidating people and having that chilling effect you talked about earlier. Mr North: I would like to add one thing which is, I think, absolutely core and for all kinds of reasons I think we should make it infinitely easier for anybody who wants to, to hide their home address. Publicising the name and address as a person's identity is, in the modern world, quite dangerous and completely unnecessary. It is just a thing we have got into and it exposes lots of people to a great deal of unpleasantness and worse. Q108 Chairman: On the internet point if you believe something must be done the question is what because it is really difficult to try and decide how you can control the internet and how to police it. Mr Gay: At certain times we have chased down websites through different
ISPs and things like that and you end up in censorship-free websites in Mr Dear: The point about it is that most of the people engaged certainly in the Redwatch website are engaging in criminal activity in other ways. Actually, in our discussions with the Home Office about tackling this it is looking at the criminality, the fund-raising, the race hate and all the other issues so that actually the people behind the website can be targeted in that way and you reduce its impact like that, rather than trying to find certainly a national mechanism to control websites like that because, as has been said, they will simply move to another country and another domain name. So it is targeting some of the functions behind the public face of the website. Q109 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: Can I ask you finally about the injunction? You brilliantly successfully used the weapon of the injunction to deal with the appalling behaviour that you were being subjected to. The injunction is an extremely powerful weapon because it is civil so you do not need a criminal standard of proof and because, if it is breached, there can be a contempt of court and you will go to prison and because it can cover third parties - a kind of Spycatcher injunction, very broad indeed. You have demonstrated that the law is capable of being very effective at using the injunction; all of that I understand. The only problem which we would like your help on is that looking at the terms of the injunction the first part one understands because it is all about stopping people from harassing in various ways, but then the injunction goes on, much more broadly, or appears to. I do not know if you have a copy of it here, if you have not I can just remind you of it. If you look at paragraph 3 on the second or third page - do you see that paragraph? Mr Gay: Yes. Q110 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: When it comes to that it says "The protesters be restrained from coming into or remaining in the exclusion zone identified on the plan for the purposes of or for conducting any demonstration or protest, such zone comprising ..." and then it lists it and then it says various things about how many people are on the exception: once every seven days, for how long and so on. That is dealing with what would normally be regarded as a lawful demonstration or protest so some might say that the injunction was over-broad in that respect and was catching behaviour that it ought not to catch whereas the rest of it was perfectly proper. How would you respond to a critic who said that - you might agree with it? Mr Gay: Very specifically the timeliness, the numbers and the duration - which are the specifics you are talking about here - were drawn together by what had occurred in the 12 months before the injunction was agreed on, so when there was no injunction what was the level of protest so that could be continued? The example of what had been occurring before, that is what would set it up for the future and so if people do want to turn up - they used to turn up weekly, they can now turn up weekly, so we are not limiting that. You could say if they wanted to turn up twice-weekly they cannot do that; you are absolutely right to say we could be restricting it, but what it was set at was what was their activity previous to that and how then that would continue into the future. That is what it was set at. Q111 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: Would it then be right that the safeguard - not for you but for the protesters - would again be the Human Rights Act effectively because if this was really used in a draconian way they would be able to go back to the judge and say will you vary the injunction, it is disproportionate the way it is operating in practice and the fair balance test is not operating properly. Mr Gay: They can appeal straightaway to the judge, as we can appeal to the judge if they do not live by the injunction, so either party can appeal to the judge and I do not think either party has appealed to the judge since the injunction was made a court order. Q112 Dr Harris: My understanding is that it is extremely expensive and risky for individuals named in the injunction to do that because of the risk of the awarding of costs, but that was not my last question. My last question was to Richard North: your original argument was that Parliament has decided, rule of law, we should recognise that and protest is a right of course, but bearing in mind that we have a democracy and a rule of law one should not go too far, but does that argument not fall down when you are not protesting against a lawful action and you are not protesting against a policy that has gone through Parliament; for example the visit of the Chinese premier, why should people not be allowed to protest in that area or indeed protest against other people's opinions. Would you say it is logical from your argument to treat that with a higher threshold before you restrict their freedoms and require them to meet conditions before they are licensed? No one elected the Chinese premier. Mr North: True. We invited him, he is a guest of the State so to that extent we might think that we want to behave in a certain way. The protesters against that visit I do not recall raising any tensions. I do not remember there being a problem with the police. Q113 Earl of Onslow: The police reacted incredibly heavy-handed. There were people who were holding a small banner and they were really thumped. Mr North: Throughout this afternoon so far we have heard cases of alleged and actual police heavy-handedness. In my world the police need to be extraordinarily clever and sensitive and if they overdo things then they will get clobbered by journalists. Q114 Dr Harris: Can you just answer my question which is do you think there ought to be a more subtle and different threshold when you are not protesting against something that has been decided by our Parliament but protesting against alleged human rights abuses in other countries? Mr North: I wish I had a ready answer. My principle breaks down if you want to press that, yes; on the other hand he is a guest of the State so he is welcome here so far as I am concerned in that kind of way and protests towards him should be moderate, well-behaved, the ordinary protests that we automatically allow without question. People who do these ordinary protests should not be thumped by policemen, it is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons to have policemen hitting people. Chairman: We have exhausted our questions; do any of you want to add anything to what you have said before we end the first session. Thank you all very much, perhaps we could just adjourn for a couple of minutes while we change our witness panel. Memoranda submitted by Climate Camp, Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases and
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Phil McLeish, Climate Camp, Ms Lindis Percy, Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases, and Mr Milan Rai, Justice Not Vengeance, gave evidence. Q115 Chairman: We come to our second panel of the afternoon session, and we are joined by Phil McLeish, who is from the legal support team for Climate Camp, Lindis Percy who is from the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases, and Milan Rai, Justice Not Vengeance; thank you all for joining us this afternoon. Perhaps we could start with a general question and start with Phil and work along. Do you agree that it is appropriate for the law to distinguish between peaceful and violent protest? Should civil disobedience or direct action be categorised or understood in some sort of different way? Mr McLeish: The law does obviously distinguish between peaceful and violent protest and there are plenty of tools within criminal law to distinguish between peaceful and non-violent protests; the law already distinguishes quite well. What is important is that when decisions are taken about essentially what policing priorities should be, where the police should invest their time and energy, police should be concerned about violence but obviously non-violent protest should not attract police interest in the same way and should be more or less left to get on with itself. Ms Percy: I would not condone in any way any violence, whether that is protesting or whatever. I am grounded in non-violence - I am Quaker and so that is the philosophy that I would follow. Therefore I think that there should be a distinction actually because violence is usually assault and there are mechanisms to deal with somebody who has assaulted somebody. Over the years since I have been involved, certainly, police powers and laws that are maybe not meant to be directed at peaceful protesters - for example, sections 68 and 69 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act which was never meant for legal protest - have been used extensively, so I am concerned that the law is used and people are caught up in laws that were never meant for a particular group of people. Mr Rai: Can I make a couple of general remarks before I turn to the
question? The first general remark I
would like to make is that I was here for the earlier session and I heard
Richard North's opinion. I think that
one of the problems that I had with some of the things that he said was his
distinction between protest and protesters and other activities of ordinary
people. My view is that protest - and
obviously there is a spectrum - is an activity which ordinary people do and it
is like sport or engagement in music and other entertainments, or a variety of
things that people do which on occasion in certain forms causes a disruption or
inconvenience to other people. So unless
we are going to have licensing to go to a football match or to go to a major
pop concert or things like that I do not understand the logic of requiring
licensing for doing protesting as a category.
I do not see that it is such a separate category, it is something that
people do, and in my view protest is not coming out of a human need for entertainment
or sporting activity, it comes out of a human need to take responsibility for
your society and therefore you engage in a variety of activities, some of which
we call protest, which are extra-Parliamentary.
Another general point I would like to make is that I have a little bit
of a difficulty coming to discuss this topic with you - I indicated it in my
paper - which is that as Richard North said there is this problem of the
failure of our institutions to regulate state and other powerful entities' activity. A lot of what we call protest would disappear
if people - and I have not spoken to the others about this so I cannot speak
for the panel as a whole or even many activists - if there was a sense that
Parliament and the judiciary and the police were implementing many laws which
are not being implemented or were able to incorporate into the law concerns
which are very widely felt but which are not captured in our present law - for
example, the concern for future generations which lies behind a lot of the
issues around climate change. The most
obvious example of that recently has been the decision of the British
Government, with a vote in Parliament to approve of their decision, to in my
view break international law by launching a war of aggression against Q116 Chairman: We are not going to debate the individual issues today. Mr Rai: I am not going to debate that; what I am trying to indicate is that there is a problem in coming to you to talk about the laws around protest when for very many of the people who are engaged in protest what they see is not a problem of the disruption that protest causes but disruption for future generations, to society as a whole, to other societies caused by the activities of the Government, corporations and so on, which they are trying to remedy inadequately, generally timidly, and in a minor way, causing minor disruptions to the body of society when there are major disturbances and disruptions being caused by corporations and governments who are allowed to proceed unhindered by Parliament and the judiciary and the police. I will move on to your question unless you want to come back on that. Q117 Chairman: I will come back on that because in your memorandum you refer to conventional channels failing to defend basic principles. What are those basic principles if they are different to what you have just said? Mr Rai: What are the basic principles? I have referred to one in relation to concern for future generations. We do not have, as far as I understand it - and I am not an expert - a legal framework either domestically or internationally to protect the rights of future generations from the damage that we are doing to the planet. There is a whole bunch of things like that. Q118 Chairman: Yes, that is one particular thing that you have raised; what are the other basic principles that you think would relate to our society and democracy for example? Mr Rai: The other main example I pointed to was the waging of aggressive war. Q119 Chairman: That is an example; that is not a principle. Mr Rai: Which violates principles incorporated into the UN charter but not incorporated into domestic law here. Q120 Chairman: So representative democracy is not a principle. Mr Rai: Democracy is a principle; I think democracy is a fundamental principle. Q121 Chairman: The other thing you refer to is failing to reflect the wishes of the majority. Mr Rai: Yes. Q122 Chairman: How are the wishes of the majority expressed other than through representative democracy? Mr Rai: Representative democracy has many benefits but representative democracy also has some flaws, and the system that we have in this country is that representative democracy is restricted to the civil sphere, there is no representative democracy in the economic and financial sphere, so in that part of our lives we have no representative democracy and we only have an indirect means of influencing it via Parliament, law and so on. There is a breach of democracy in that area. Q123 Chairman: You talk about the wishes of the majority; how are the wishes of the majority expressed, for example on the war in Iraq, other than through representative democracy? If you hold a demonstration of a million people, fine, a million people turn out on the streets but that means 50 odd million did not. Mr Rai: If I can distinguish between two things, one of them is what mechanisms currently exist for the majority to express their view and what instruments could one imagine or exist in other countries on major issues such as climate change and making war. There are other mechanisms like referendums; there is a variety of different mechanisms that one could imagine for expressing the wish of the majority, which does not happen in our system where we simply elect an individual representative who then comes under a variety of influences to represent a particular body of people. Q124 Earl of Onslow: Are you saying that the whole body politic is unconstitutional? Mr Rai: I hesitate to say --- Q125 Earl of Onslow: Because that is what you have just said, or at least that is what I understand you to have said: because I do not agree with the decision that is made the body politic is by its nature unconstitutional. Mr Rai: What I was trying to indicate is I think an argument can be made in certain cases - I am not saying universally if I disagree with something therefore democracy has fallen down and therefore the argument has to be made - but I think the argument can be made in a number of cases, including the Iraq war, including climate change and various others, that currently Parliament, the judiciary and the police are not performing the function of stopping great harm being done - I think in the case of war outwith international law. Obviously there was a great debate at the time by international lawyers and I am not an international lawyer, so I am not in a very good position to give an authoritative view. But that is my view, an argument has to be made and if it can be made then there are very serious failings and I think there are very serious failings. Shall I turn to your original question? Q126 Chairman: Yes, please. Mr Rai: I think one can distinguish on the one hand between one axis which is about legality and the other axis which is to do with violence and there is a difference between violence to property and violence to persons - maybe there are three axes. There is a particular political space, therefore, and different kinds of protests occupy different places in that. I think what lies behind your question - and perhaps I am misunderstanding - is in what ways should the law on protest be framed to deal differently with protests occupying different positions within that space. My view is that I am not convinced that there should be any law specifically about protest. I am not a great expert on public order law and law and protests and so on - my memory of it starts with the 1986 Public Order Act - but I have yet to see a protest law which does not cover activities which are already covered by criminal law which forbids harming people, harming property or intimidating people and so on. I do not understand the rationale for laws on protest. Q127 Chairman: Do you think the State has got any role to facilitate protest? Mr Rai: I did raise the point of this word that was used in the remit of the discussion. I think there is a flavour to the word "facilitate" which I found a little bit difficult and the position that I come from is that protest is another human activity which occurs in society and people who engage in it should be regulated by agreed law in the same way that people who engage in sport or whatever are regulated. The use of the word "facilitate" to me tended to lean towards a somewhat paternalistic approach to policing which tended to give the flavour that protest is a privilege which is bestowed upon groups, and if that was the flavour of it I found that difficult - if there is no flavour of that then I have no problems with the word but that sense of the police as gatekeepers who grant privileges to people to carry out what in my view are just ordinary human activities which everyone should be able to engage in, subject to the controls that are political --- Q128 Chairman: What about holding the ring when there is a counter-protest? Mr Rai: Absolutely, the police do have a role, as was discussed earlier, in balancing the interests of different parties in a particular situation - that is what happens and I think that protests and counter-protests both have a right to exist which should be protected in so far as possible. Mr McLeish: Can I say something about facilitating protest? In my case this is something which has become more and more common - the police will come to people on a protest and say "Hello, we are here to facilitate the protest" and very often it is not necessarily helpful, and facilitating a protest will often mean trying to micromanage it, so if you are standing on the side of the road the police will want to put you behind a pen so that passers-by can look at you in a contained --- Q129 Earl of Onslow: What is unreasonable from the police's point of view about asking you to stand back off the pavement so that somebody can walk down the pavement on their daily business? Mr McLeish: I was not suggesting that they stand back, but obviously if you are conducting a protest on the street you want to engage with and interact with members of the public. The visual aesthetic effect of being placed behind a cordoned-off steel cage is that members of the public walk past and they think either these people are obviously dangerous like animals in a zoo, they need to be caged, or they think they are obviously some kind of odd bunch, I will just carry on. It does not enable that kind of interaction. For example, if you want to organise a march in my experience no one nowadays actually believes, no one understands, that there is a basic right to organise a march and that your duty under the public order legislation is to notify the police. I noticed this at a meeting recently to organise a march at Climate Camp - everyone thinks that you have to ask for permission to march and when I explained that actually the law is framed so that all you have to do is notify the police, no one really accepts that or believes that and invariably conditions will be imposed on the march which are impossible to challenge because the way the law is framed is that if a police officer reasonably believes that there may be a serious disruption to the life of the community a condition can be imposed. Frequently these are more for the convenience of the police in managing their time or their work schedule, I believe, or in any case in my impression are designed to simply enable the police to manage things as best they can. When you have a march at least nowadays - this was not the case ten years ago - the police will want to overload the march with police officers so a typical ratio now between police and protesters could easily be one to one which, again, ten to fifteen years ago was never the case. The other striking difference is that it used to be a rule of thumb that protesters would slightly exaggerate how many people go on an event and the police would slightly downplay it, and you always assumed the truth was in the middle. Now we have an odd state of affairs where police and protesters are essentially colluding in over-egging the figures because the police are obviously trying to justify their budget. For example, at Climate Camp freedom of information request figures now suggest that £5.9 million was spent on that protest, which is something like £4,000 per head - a lot of these people were just going to attend workshops in a field. You have got a situation where the police, having committed resources like that, have got to pretend that there is something to police. It is very different to the 1980s where you had armed battles on the streets and public order policing meant that you were actually there to ensure public order. Ten to fifteen years ago demonstrations would have a couple of bobbies on the side walking along the demonstration and the riot vans would be parked around the corner; nowadays the police will swamp the protest, not necessarily carrying shields but sometimes with helmets and certainly with their jumpsuits - they swamp the protest with riot police. Again at Climate Camp there was a striking example where there were 23 people stood at a fence, lots of them looking like hippies basically, playing guitar and singing; you looked across and there were two or three rows of police armed with truncheons, shields, helmets, ready as if to have a riot. Initially I was shocked, saying, "How can you believe there is a threat there?" Then, of course, you realise it is nothing to do with that. It is either psychology, just trying to intimidate people, or it is simply they have got the stuff, they have to pretend to use it, otherwise the budget is going to get cut and they will not have this part of the police force functioning any more. In any event, this kind of micro-management and total overcontrol of protests is a death of a thousand cuts. Q130 Chairman: We have a lot of ground to cover, so if you try and keep your comments as brief as you can. Ms Percy: Yes, I would like to add to
what has been said in that I would like to state straightaway that protest is
always going to upset somebody, that is the nature of protest. It is one of the ways to show Government or
whoever you are protesting against or at what you are concerned about. It is also, why do people not protest? You talked about the majority of people who
did not go onto the streets of Q131 Chairman: What do you mean by "behind"? Ms Percy: I suppose you can never quite prove these things, but the American authorities are in control and occupation of at least ten bases in this country and we would argue that the British Government is actually out of control of what goes on in these bases. Also I would like to bring in the special relationship that frankly is so special that the Americans --- Q132 Chairman: That is not for today, I am afraid. Ms Percy: No, but it is also there in the centre. There is this overemphasis and overpolicing of demonstrations. In our experience the surveillance, the videoing, yes, the waiting in vans for just a few demonstrators is quite absurd and over the top and it is increasing. It is very concerning that increasingly civil liberties are being eroded in a very sort of insidious way actually and I could provide the Committee with specific examples of this. Q133 Chairman: A slightly different question. To what extent should the state be involved in policing or dealing with the question of protest on private land or what you might call semi-private or semi-public land, like a private shopping centre or something like that? Phil? Mr McLeish: Obviously the police should intervene if there are criminal offences likely to be caused. Q134 Chairman: Should we permit protest on private land? Mr McLeish: If people are breaking the law, then the police have a power and a duty to intervene. If people are not breaking the law, then basically no. I think civil matters should be dealt with through civil processes. What we have seen, and my experience is focused on the experience of Climate Camp over three years, is that on each case the overriding strategic objective of the police - and this is an impression based on what the police are doing and what it seems to be trying to achieve - was to prevent any breaches of the private property of, in turn, the Drax power station in Yorkshire, BAA's office in London and Kingsnorth power station. Essentially, the police are functioning as private security guards to the companies concerned. Q135 Chairman: If private security guards had been there to stop you getting into the BAA office and there had been a confrontation, what then? Mr McLeish: It is difficult. You do not want to be a conspiracy theorist about this, but from the point of view of direct action being effective, if people had got into Kingsnorth power station and private security guards had been pulling them out, there would have been media coverage of those people who are trying to stop a new coal fired power station being built being manhandled and pulled out of a power station by those people who are trying to increase our carbon emissions and that would have had a powerful symbolic significance. Eon, the company behind this, would have been well in the middle of the frame. By keeping Eon out of the picture and having media coverage of protesters scurrying around fields being followed by helicopters and armed police, it conveys a very different message. Q136 Chairman: Do you think you have the right to protest inside Kingsnorth or BAA's offices? Do they have the right to stop you doing that? Mr McLeish: Obviously anyone who breaks the law, myself or anyone, can expect that they can be prosecuted and there are crimes connected with, for example, disrupting work on private land, there is a crime of aggravated trespass. If the nature of the way you are behaving inside the site was to cause fear or concern to people who are working there, there would be public order offences you could be charged with. Q137 Chairman: That is not the question I asked you. Do you think you have a right to protest inside these places? Mr McLeish: In a legal or a moral sense? Q138 Chairman: In a legal sense or a moral sense. Mr McLeish: In a moral sense then certainly 50 years down the line, if it comes to that, the people who are building Kingsnorth power station or the civil servants who are making an expansion of fossil fuel burning go ahead at the moment will be regarded by history the way that we look at the civil servants who carried out the Holocaust. Q139 Earl of Onslow: How sure are you that you are right on that? Mr McLeish: If you look at the science --- Earl of Onslow: I have looked. The world temperature has not increased for ten years and there is more ice on the Arctic ice cap this year than there was last year. Are they signs of global warning? Lord Bowness: It is not the issue. Chairman: We are not debating global warning. Earl of Onslow: I agree. Q140 Chairman: Global warming is off the agenda. We are trying to get to the issue of debating the right to protest. Do you think you should have a legal right to protest at BAA offices? Mr McLeish: I was talking about a moral right, obviously the law --- Q141 Chairman: Do you think you should have a legal right if there is not one? Mr McLeish: What I think should happen, what I would be happy with, would be that pre-emptive action by the police basically to function as private security guards of corporations would not happen. What would happen would be that the police would arrest people who break the law, charge them and bring them to trial as they do when they are policing crime in the cities, when they are policing any other form of crime basically rather than think of protest as a special kind of activity - I completely agree with what Milan said - that has to be dealt with as a pathological form of behaviour. It should simply be treated as a normal activity. Q142 Chairman: That is not the question I asked you. Do you think you should have the legal right to protest inside those private property premises? Mr McLeish: There is the legal right as in a right which is not prohibited by criminal law. There is a right to walk over a fence provided you do not cause any criminal damage and trespass on someone's land, they can then sue you for trespass and use force to evict you. That is a tortious act, it is not a right in a criminal sense. It is an activity which can happen. Q143 Chairman: I am sorry, let me take it one stage further, then we will move on. Supposing you have got the BAA offices at Heathrow Airport, you want to get inside, you say it is okay for private security guards to prevent you getting access? Mr McLeish: Yes. Q144 Chairman: That ends up in a confrontation, a punch-up. Would it not be better for the police to do that to stop that happening? Mr McLeish: The police can do that. If the police take a view that the situation on the ground suggests there may be a breach of the peace, they already have the power to act to stop that. The problem is at the moment the police just take a default attitude relying, were they ever to be challenged in the courts on this, on their powers to prevent a breach of the peace. They take a default attitude no trespass can happen. I have heard police officers say when I asked them at Heathrow why they are hitting people, why they stop people, why they cordon people into a group and did not let anyone go in or out of the crowd for several hours, they said, "Well, people were attacking the building. I said, "What do you mean?" "The building was attacked", and I said, "What do you mean?" "People were trying to get in". From the police point of view clearly any kind of trespass in their kind of functioning would amount to a breach of the peace. This is totally different from the way it was, as Lord Lester was talking about, in the 1990s with the veal exports or anti-roads protests. In that period the police were happy to show up and keep an eye on what was going on. If there was a suggestion that the peace might be breached or if people were committing crimes, they would arrest people, that was their duty. They did not see their duty as squashing protest before it got off the ground, making sure that any form of direct action was completely ineffective and stopping the issue getting effective media coverage. That was not their role. Q145 Lord Bowness: Chairman, one very brief question to follow up on your question, which with respect has still not been answered. Mr McLeish, you are making totally heavy weather of this. It does not really matter what the police think or you think in answer to the Chairman's question. The question is, should you be able to protest on private land? Mr McLeish: Yes. Q146 Lord Bowness: A very simple example would be in the past you could march down the high street, that would have been on public property being policed in the normal way. If, however, the centre of the town is in fact a privately owned shopping centre where people have various interests, do you think you should be able to protest in that shopping centre or not, notwithstanding that it is private land? It is really just a very simple question. Mr McLeish: Essentially I do, I think the right to protest should be protected whether it is on private land or public land. Q147 Earl of Onslow: You reckon that it is reasonable to disrupt others following their lawful business? Mr McLeish: That would lay you open to a potential charge for aggravated trespass, so it would not be lawful. Q148 Earl of Onslow: Yes, but demonstration on private property in private property by its very nature disrupts people going about their lawful business. Mr McLeish: Yes, and there are laws --- Mr Rai: Could I please come in since I referred to quasi-public space in my submission? Q149 Chairman: Briefly, because we have got a lot of ground to cover. Mr Rai:
I think there are two questions. One is
about quasi-public space and my feeling is that there is an analogy here with
the footpaths. Footpaths were laid down,
common land was privatised and the people of this country defended their right
to use footpaths as a public space.
There are spaces which became privatised which have been used for
communal purposes and there should be legal recognition. Liberty have set out a number of criteria for
recognising quasi-public spaces which have a public quality to them that should
be recognised within which people should be free to undertake a range of
activities such as protesting. I think
that is perfectly straightforward. Chairman: I am sorry, we are not going down debating the issues. We are debating the issue of the right to protest. Q150 Dr Harris: I have got a slightly different question. Ms Percy: Could I not just --- Q151 Dr Harris: You will probably have a chance, but we have got to get through some of the questions. Ms Percy: We were all asked, though. Q152 Dr Harris: There are a lot of questions and I have got some for you as well. You will lose the chance to answer those because we are over time. I want to ask something that was dealt with in the earlier panel, which is that there is clearly a distinction between violence to people and damage to property. Do you see a distinction between civil disobedience that does not involve damage to property and damage to property actions, Lindis? Ms Percy: There is a distinction. We would not participate in any action that was potentially going to harm somebody, but I have to say also as an example that when you have a law, the Military Lands Act, many of these acts are invalid and we cannot get them to court because the police will not arrest so we can bring them to court. I think taking down a by-laws notice, which is potentially criminal damage, is quite justified. Q153 Dr Harris: I am talking about damage that wrecks someone's livelihood. Would you be loath to see that excused even on the basis of lawful excuse? Ms Percy: Yes, I would. Q154 Dr Harris: I have read - I am sure we have all read - the evidence from the Climate Camp that you provided and indeed your evidence, Ms Percy, about CAAB and so forth. I have had a number of constituents complain to me - it is Oxford after all - about what they describe as overpolicing of the Climate Camp. You have identified these problems of overpolicing, searching, filming, pretending to require names and addresses to be provided and sudden changes to previously agreed conditions and routes. Do you see any way that this can be overcome without change in the law? In other words, do you think there is good practice out there, it is just individual police officers, or do you think we do really need to change it from the top down or through law, briefly, any of you? Mr Rai: Could I say something briefly which is that I think one of the things which any criminal lawyer and protestor knows is there is a boundary to what the law says and what the police actually do, which is beyond that. I think what we have is a vast body of law which is basically telling police protest is bad, it is a problem, and I see no justification for that protest law. We have laws to control unacceptable behaviour, whether violent or whatever, and personally I think we should roll back laws to control protests. Q155 Dr Harris: You have said that already. I am asking, is there anything that we can do about this? In other words, have you been able, Mr McLeish, to take cases and I think you are in the process of taking cases? Are you hopeful that if the police have to apologise enough, provide enough compensation and lose cases they will learn your point of view? Mr McLeish: The way I see it is it is very difficult. This is not like Southall in the 1970s where you have got a small group of police becoming very ill-disciplined and beating someone up on a street or killing someone, it is not like that. What you have got is hundreds of really petty incidents which cumulatively make going to a protest extremely unpleasant, potentially frightening or worrying and then the only way to challenge it would be hundreds of really petty complaints about different issues. It is very hard for them to be aggregated so, for example, say the police have seized lots and lots of people's property and there are lots of situations where you could have a good claim to go to a local county court and say, "I am going to sue you for trespass of goods. You had no lawful basis for seizing my property", but in most cases --- Q156 Dr Harris: It is not practical? Mr McLeish: --- it is not practical. Q157 Dr Harris: Is there any complaints procedure, IPCC, anything like that, which is of any use to you after these situations? I know it is after the fact. Mr McLeish: We are frustrated by the ineffectiveness of it. The remedy which does work quite well is if you have been assaulted by the police, you can make a civil claim. If you have been assaulted by the police, you can make a civil claim and you get a jury trial. I am not sure how it helps the police to change the way they behave, but it is an individual remedy that works. Beyond that, it is very difficult. Q158 Dr Harris: It was suggested that Camp police just were not used to this, although there were police from everywhere else, it was one of the places they were in charge. Is it your experience or experience of people you know that there are some police forces with someone at the top who is quite good at doing a deal, sticking to it and preventing "ad hoc-eries" stepping in from the helicopter, loud speaker announcements as you are giving your evidence? Lindis? Ms Percy: Yes, I think there are. I have to say there are some very good police around and very reasonable and who will almost go overboard in trying to do their duty to enable a demonstration to go ahead without problems, but over the years the police have agreed to various things and then on the day it has totally changed. We talk to the police, we are very careful about talking to the police and trying to compromise or trying to foresee problems that might happen, but it does depend very much on attitudes of the police and also whether they agree with the demonstration, what you are concerned about. I do think it is about training of the police. Also they are all dressed up in these very aggressive uniforms. Q159 Dr Harris: You are saying that they change their policy on the basis of whether they agree with you. Ms Percy: I do not know. It seems like that, it comes across like that. There are perfectly reasonable discussions and quite aggressive attitudes come over. I think there is a lot of fear around from the police point of view too. Q160 Dr Harris: I am going to assume you all agree that the fact there may be sympathy with your protest should be immaterial. I think you put that in your written evidence, Mr Rai. Mr Rai: I can give an example of this, which is I was once being held by the police inside the perimeter of the nuclear weapons factory at Aldermaston. They let me out of a very confining small cell that I was being held in because it was very hot and so on, they let me sit outside. They said, "If you were a roads protestor, we would be treating you harshly rather than letting you out", so the different groups and causes are treated in different ways by the police. You build up a self-reinforcing dynamic where bad behaviour by protestors causes prejudice on the part of the police. You get into a dynamic where you get to a very poisoned situation and, unfortunately, the police really should be the ones who should try to break that cycle. Q161 Dr Harris: I have one final question because I know Lord Morris wants to pursue some of these things. Do you think there is any protest, even that is non-violent, that is unacceptable, for example where people protest to shut down other people's free speech such as No Platform protests? Do you think those are as legitimate as your protests? Ms Percy: I think we should be very vigilant and careful about civil liberties which have been struggled for over centuries and I have a concern about that. Q162 Dr Harris: You would campaign, if you were asked to, to let fascists march? Ms Percy: Yes. Mr Rai: Absolutely. The discussion earlier about Red Watch and the different websites, personally I hope I never get onto the Red Watch website but if I did, I think that the route for dealing with speech, which is what is happening on the internet there, is by tackling the criminality people engage in and not what is said. Ms Percy: Could I say, we were on the Combat 18 list and it is not a pleasant place to be. Q163 Mr Timpson: Could I ask all of you about the position with designated areas and the different law that now applies, for instance with civil trespass on a nuclear facility wherever that may be. Do you think certain geographical areas should be treated differently from the rest of the country or should it be one law that fits all geographical areas? Ms Percy: It is another law. You are talking about SOCPA law? Q164 Mr Timpson: Yes. Ms Percy: There are two, 28 to 32, one about Parliament which I think is quite unacceptable that there are these restrictions and you have to get permission at the moment. Q165 Mr Timpson: Would you want to repeal that? Ms Percy: Absolutely. It is essential at the seat of government and
Mr Rai: If I could say something. In relation to the area around Parliament, I am little bit biased because I have been convicted and fined and sent to prison for not paying a fine for the restrictions around Parliament. I cannot see a justification for those restrictions on protest. In relation to the other designated areas, I fail to understand the value of criminalising peaceful trespass on these lands. It has nothing to do with security because any real security threat is going to be caught by other laws and this is what I mean by not understanding the justification for the bulk of the laws on protest. If I am going to carry out a terrorist attack on a base - I have been inside US bases in this country without permission - I am not going to be charged on trespass laws, it is completely irrelevant. The only purpose of that kind of law is to try and squash dissent of a peaceful variety and I just do not see a justification for making peaceful protest of that nature a crime. Q166 Mr Timpson: You go beyond the issue of proportionality, it is simply no justification? Mr Rai: I cannot see why we should be making walking around peacefully a criminal activity, wherever it is taking place. If someone is taking implements to blow something up or whatever, we will capture that under other laws. Simply walking around peacefully, which is what that law is about, I do not see why we should have a law banning that. Mr McLeish: I would like to second everything the other two have said. I am particularly concerned about the situation around Parliament, though. It makes me embarrassed to be British really that we live in a society where protest at the heart of the state is regarded as something that has to be specially controlled. Q167 Chairman: Do you draw a distinction in Parliament between one side of the gates and the other, or the whole of the building? Mr McLeish: It is Q168 Chairman: Yes, but SOCPA also applies within the gates. Mr McLeish: People should be able to lobby their MPs, they should be able to get to Parliament. I think if there were circumstances where there were particular problems, people being obstructed, it might need to be reconsidered, but I do not really see why there should be any kind of restriction on accessing Parliament. Mr Rai: Could I say something which is I have been arrested on the grounds of the Houses of Parliament as well and from that I know that the Houses of Parliament have their own laws about this, they do not have to obey PACE and so on. That is what I was told by the security staff who detained me. They could have just detained me indefinitely because they have a different regime there. I think that SOCPA is of relevance to outside Parliament because within Parliament a different regime has been instituted but, again, we are coming into the area of quasi-public spaces. There are private rooms, which are one thing, and then there are quasi-public spaces within the grounds of Parliament and I do not see why protesting there is that different from just outside Parliament. It is not the same thing as saying you should be able to go into someone's private space and harass them, it is a slightly different thing I think. In terms of the quasi public spaces outside the gates and quasi public spaces inside, I do not see a distinguishing criterion. Ms Percy: Could I just say that if there is something going on in a house, for instance, that is totally unlawful there is a case to go to that house. I am thinking perhaps of an example of child protection issues. Q169 Chairman: But is that not a matter for the authorities to deal with, not private people? If there is a child protection issue it will be for Social Services. Ms Percy: If nobody knows about it, if I, as a private citizen, know about it then there is a case to go in and say --- Q170 Chairman: Is it not your duty to tell Social Services? Ms Percy: Absolutely. It is comparable to what we are all involved with, that increasingly the systems and structures that are available to the citizen to use if you have a concern are not working and the Executive is increasingly not brought to account. Q171 Lord Bowness: One brief question to all three witnesses, if I may, on this question of Parliament. I have some sympathy about legislation on protest in Parliament Square, but would the witnesses not accept that there is a case for some control over protests around Parliament from the point of view of getting members in and out the place? It is particularly relevant so far as the House of Commons is concerned when there might be a smaller majority than there is at this time and a protest preventing members getting there could affect the outcome of a vote. That would not be very democratic. Ms Percy: No. Mr Rai: Can I ask a factual question? It is my understanding that there is a private, secure tunnel from the tube station into the grounds of Parliament. Q172 Lord Bowness: Well, Mr Rai, not everybody comes on the Underground, with great respect. Mr Rai: I understand that entirely, but if somebody --- Q173 Chairman: No is the short answer, it does not work like that. Ms Percy: I think there are mechanisms to deal with that. If somebody is obstructing then there is a law. Lord Bowness: It is very difficult to deal with it when you have got however many thousands of people already there if you have not got some control in advance. Q174 Chairman: Lord Bowness has an important point here, and Ms Percy was the one who was fingered for this question, I think. Supposing a government has a majority of two or three and you have a huge crowd of people outside stopping MPs getting in and that has the consequence of a vote in Parliament coming out the opposite to what it would otherwise be. Ms Percy: Then that is a case maybe for the police to be brought in to deal with that situation so that there is not confrontation. It is really important that Members of Parliament do go about their business, as indeed do other people, but it is about proportionality too. Mr Rai: As a matter of practicality, whether or not there is such a law is going to make no difference to the people who show up and blockade. If those people who are there are of such a passion and mind that they are there blockading the place, it is not going to make any difference whether there is such a law or not. All that you are doing is creating another offence which I think is really going to capture the organisers and perhaps will deter some people from organising protests. The kind of people who would organise protests which would blockade Parliament probably are not going to be affected by such laws. If I could make one point in relation to advance authorisation and so on. Currently the system under SOCPA is that you have to seek the authorisation of the police in advance in a specified format and then they are required to give permission but they may impose conditions, they may move you to a different place, may give you a different time, may restrict the number of people and so on. I think that system has now been discredited. There is talk, however, of moving to a system of advance notification. If that was voluntary we would be returning to the status quo ante and there would be no civil liberties problems arising. However, if it is compulsory advance notification I see no real distinction between that and compulsory advance authorisation because if you have not notified in advance in the form required you have not been given permission to do it, it is still unlawful. Compulsory advance notification is the equivalent of compulsory advance authorisation and I would suggest that it bears the same defects as the current system. Chairman: I am afraid we have run way beyond our time. Thank you for coming. |