Since coming to power, it would appear that New Labour has a terrible fear of any form of protest, due to the number of laws and changes it keeps bringing in with regord to public order situations. Some of these laws are fairly straightforward, to criminalise various popular activities such as office occupations or Parliament Square demos. Others seek to suppress successful campaigns such as Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs. Several have the purpose of giving the police much wider powers of arrest to suppress protest on the day without necessarily ending up with mass charges. Many increase the punishments available to the courts for various actions.

A number of these laws are very dubious in nature, and will probably be narrowed down in the appeals courts. However, there is a more worrying trend -- to confuse civil and criminal law.

At first this may seem simply a semantic point, but for protestors it has consequences. For instance, acts of 'tort', such as causing a public nuisance, or anything normally dealt with by civil courts, are slowly being lumped in with criminal actions. The recent Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCA) has opened the door to this. It begins by focusing on the animal rights movement, but by criminalising action which interferes with commercial contracts (e.g. those related to animal research organisations) the door is open for future versions aimed at other protest movements. This so called 'functional creep' is already happening with anti-terror legislation. Though designed to stop the likes of Al Qaeda and the IRA, it is more likely to be found being used against people exercising their human right to protest.

One strand of this push to crush protest is already well under way: that of using the civil courts to clamp down on individuals and groups. Following the success of the McLibel case, companies grew very hesitant to take out private prosecutions against campaigners, fearing public backlash and the risk of long court cases.

This trend is being reversed using the Protection From Harassment Act 1997, AKA the anti-stalking law. The government, in collusion with a particular lawyer -- Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden -- is seeking to identify protest with harassment. The act can then be used to create injunctions, legal orders that put draconian limits on protesters' rights (e.g. banning them from certain areas, from gathering in groups over a certain number, etc.). In the worst case, to protect property developers Emerson, whole chunks of towns have been declared out of bounds for animal rights activists. These injunctions are justified by referring to past illegal acts, but the court is asked to penalise legitimate protest instead. It is a dubious approach, but because of the incessant demonisation of the animal rights movement in mainstream media, and other dirty tricks, judges have seen fit to grant the injunctions. The police have also been cooperating closely with the lawyers and companies as it makes life much easier for them: instead of having to find you guilty of an actual crime, they can now simply say that you are breaching an injunction -- which is contempt of court with the penalty of a maximum five years in prison.

Lawson-Cruttenden describe themselves as 'the market leader in obtaining ground breaking injunctions on behalf of individuals and corporations who have been the subject of harassment by direct action protest groups.' (www.lawson-cruttenden.co.uk/index.html).

Recently the lawyers have got ambitious and started taking on non-animal rights groups, in particular the campaign against arms manufacturer Edo in Brighton; Smash Edo, a local campaign, got served with one of the injunctions. The result was a public outcry and a case set to challenge both the legitimacy of the war and the injunctions themselves. Edo has got both a lot of bad press and a very weak injunction, while actually boosting the numbers of people protesting against it.

As with the McLibel case, when activists stand up and take the battle to the company in the courts, there is much scope to turn the tables. Huntingdon Life Sciences and Edo have both spent significant amounts of money on injunctions against protests, yet it is hard to see just what value they have got. The Edo trial in November promises to be a very interesting showdown on many issues.

On October 23rd the Freedom To Protest Conference is taking place in London, 11am - 5pm. Open to all, free of charge, the aim is to bring campaigners from every progressive movement together to discuss the current level of oppressive laws and what we can do about them. For more information see www.freedomtoprotest.org.uk, or come along on the day to The Resource Centre, 356 Holloway Rd, London N7.
Corporate Watch is a supporting group of the Conference.