Journalists Are Being Arrested Under Anti-Protest Laws
‘Intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance’ was made a criminal offence—potentially punishable by ten years in prison—by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. (Jana Shnipelson / Unsplash)
The government's authoritarian anti-protest laws aren't only targeting peaceful political demonstrations – they're being used to target journalists reporting on them, too.
On 8 November last year, LBC reporter Charlotte Lynch was on a bridge over the M25 taking photos and videos of a protest by campaign group Just Stop Oil. Two male police officers from Hertfordshire Constabulary approached her and asked who she was. She explained and showed them her press card.
That should have been their cue to leave her alone. Instead, the police put Lynch in handcuffs and took her phone. She was loaded into the back of a police van and taken to Stevenage Police Station, where officers searched her, swabbed DNA samples from the inside of her mouth, and took her fingerprints. She then spent five hours in a cell before being released without charge.
Charlotte Lynch isn’t the only journalist to have received that treatment. Photographer Tom Bowles and filmmaker Rich Felgate were also arrested while covering a Just Stop Oil demonstration the day before. Felgate later tweeted that the pair were kept in custody for thirteen hours, during which he said police tried to get him to ‘reveal journalistic sources’ and ‘give them the pin to [his] phone’, and that Bowles’ home was searched and his daughter’s iPad taken.
All three of the arrests were made ‘on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance.’ ‘Intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance’ was made a criminal offence—potentially punishable by ten years in prison—by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Tabled by then-Home Secretary Priti Patel, the Act took aim at protests by groups like Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter and the ‘annoyance’ and ‘inconvenience’ their demonstrations caused, and was criticised in Parliament and the press and protested on the streets for the chilling effect it would have on peaceful displays of political dissent.
But when it passed, the authoritarian impulses that drove it still weren’t satisfied. As the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill made its way through Parliament, the government made a last-minute attempt to tag on a set of even more draconian measures to combat the rise of actions by Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain. The amendment containing them was defeated, but the government has since revived it in the form of the Public Order Bill now passing through the House of Lords.
The implications of the Public Order Bill for protestors are terrifying enough. If passed, it’ll criminalise ‘locking on’ and ‘going equipped’ to lock on (which could mean as little as linking arms or carrying a bike lock), widen suspicionless stop and search powers, and create new Serious Disruption Prevention Orders—also being termed Protest Banning Orders—which can limit individuals’ movements, restrict their internet usage, and even see them electronically tagged.