Proposed changes to the nation’s policing, surveillance and judicial review will jeopardise the right to peaceful protest, says UN special rapporteur
Boris Johnson’s government is introducing three sets of legislation that will be making human rights violations more likely to occur in the UK and less likely to be sanctioned even as averting climate catastrophe depends on these rights, according to the UN special rapporteur for human rights and the environment.
“These three pieces of legislation are shrinking civic space at a time when the global environment crisis demands that people’s voices be heard,” said David Boyd.
Mr Boyd was referring to the new policing bill, which is proposing changes to both police enforcement and sentencing, the covert human intelligence sources bill, which protects the undercover state from prosecution for crimes, and plans to weaken the judicial review, the process to challenge the ministerial decisions, including those on the environment.
These developments are “counter to the direction we need to be going in” at a time when the “right to the freedoms of assembly, association and expression are absolutely critical to environmental progress”, said Boyd.
“One of the fundamental rights in jeopardy is access to justice and the changes to judicial review are a threat to that basic right,” he said.
This comes after there will reportedly be no “legal compulsion” to wear face masks once the coronavirus restrictions in England are lifted, the environment secretary has said, as he said that he will be ditching his face mask when the rules are scrapped.
He was speaking after the campaign group Not1More wrote to the UN urging for intervention to protect the rights of those peacefully protesting in the UK.
Not1More said that each piece of legislation would be making “people who wish to access their democratic right to peaceful protest more vulnerable to undue restrictions, arbitrary detention and/or invasive policing”.
The London-based group urged the UN to call for “accountability and no extension to police powers to curtail or break up protests or temporary encampments, and an end to violence against peaceful protesters”, which it says has been increasing within the UK.
New police powers to break up any unauthorised temporary encampments would enable them to legally remove peaceful protesters from the woodland protection camps that are near the HS2 rail development, and “residing in an unauthorised encampment would become an offence punishable with three months’ imprisonment or a fine up to £2,500”, it said.
Within a recent report to the UN with the law firm Global Diligence LLP, Not1More had documented 400 incidents of UK police allegedly using unwarranted aggressive behaviour in order to deter protesters against shale fracking and the HS2 line. It had claimed that the police had violated protesters’ rights under international law, and had targeted people based on gender and disability and endangered lives, citing the tunnel eviction in Euston last year.
Boyd said that he could not immediately verify that those incidents but “any attack on any vulnerable population paints a disturbing picture”.
“If you put this in the context of the global environmental crisis, the people trying to push us to address this crisis deserve our full support – it is in the public interest,” he said.
“Protest is not the first thing that people do – taking part is a desperate act in a desperate time when we face desperate environmental challenges.”
This comes after Prime minister Boris Johnson has said it is “looking good” for the 19th of July to be the “terminus point” for England’s coronavirus restrictions, but did not rule out the prospect of further coronavirus lockdowns in the winter.
Referring to the recent moratorium on logging after protests on Vancouver Island, Canada, he said: “We have seen this again and again – protests have the impact we need.”
“The global picture is quite nuanced in terms of countries increasing repression – but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is 75 years old and it’s troubling when a country as wealthy and powerful as the UK is not moving in this direction.”
He said: “There will have to be a backlash. If people see the UK government as increasingly repressive, at some point they will throw it out. These actions are counterproductive – we saw this in the US, where a terrible, repressive government has been replaced with an administration that in many ways is pro-human rights and pro-sustainability.”
