A new law making it easier for the police to put conditions on peaceful protests is “constitutionally unprecedented” and unlawful, according to a claim filed at the high court in London.
The former home secretary Suella Braverman used the government’s so-called Henry VIII powers to lower the threshold for the police to impose restrictions on protests, allowing it where there is merely a “more than minor” hindrance on people’s daily lives.
The government has said the regulations are an attempt to deal with the activities of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, and that the language around “more than minor” hindrances mirrors that in other new offences of ‘locking-on’ and ‘tunnelling’.
Regulations brought in by such means, known a Henry VIII powers in reference to the monarch’s preference for legislating directly by proclamation, are subject to minimal parliamentary scrutiny and decided on an “all or nothing” basis without amendments.
Liberty’s legal challenge refers to supporting comments by the Lords’ secondary legislation scrutiny committee, which had been sufficiently alarmed to warn peers of “constitutional issues” and told them it was “not aware of any examples of this approach being taken in the past”.
The legal challenge said it could not be right that parliament was “treated as having provided [the] executive with a blank cheque to lower the applicable threshold by the back door and thereby sanction greater police interference with public assemblies and protests”.
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A new law making it easier for the police to put conditions on peaceful protests is “constitutionally unprecedented” and unlawful, according to a claim filed at the high court in London.
The former home secretary Suella Braverman used the government’s so-called Henry VIII powers to lower the threshold for the police to impose restrictions on protests, allowing it where there is merely a “more than minor” hindrance on people’s daily lives.
The government has said the regulations are an attempt to deal with the activities of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, and that the language around “more than minor” hindrances mirrors that in other new offences of ‘locking-on’ and ‘tunnelling’.
Regulations brought in by such means, known a Henry VIII powers in reference to the monarch’s preference for legislating directly by proclamation, are subject to minimal parliamentary scrutiny and decided on an “all or nothing” basis without amendments.
Liberty’s legal challenge refers to supporting comments by the Lords’ secondary legislation scrutiny committee, which had been sufficiently alarmed to warn peers of “constitutional issues” and told them it was “not aware of any examples of this approach being taken in the past”.
The legal challenge said it could not be right that parliament was “treated as having provided [the] executive with a blank cheque to lower the applicable threshold by the back door and thereby sanction greater police interference with public assemblies and protests”.
The original article contains 816 words, the summary contains 234 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!