The Gown Student Newspaper at Queen's University Belfast

COMMENT: The Public Assemblies Bill: The quiet drift into witless authoritarianism

The draft Public Assemblies Bill is, at best, an unforgivably clumsy piece of legislative drafting, implicating all public assemblies, no matter how innocuous, spontaneous or legitimate, in a constrictive and disproportionate new regime ostensibly aimed only at curing recurrent problems involving “contentious parades”. At worst, it is an inexplicably insidious intrusion into the fundamental right of free assembly.

BY LORCAN MULLEN

For a public assembly of 50 or more people, (a number which, according to the bill, can be adjusted on the joint whim of the First and Deputy First Ministers) the authorities must be notified (37 days in advance for a ‘procession’, 22 days for a ‘protest meeting’), organisers must be cited and those breaching the terms of the bill would be subject to arrest without warrant.

Protests are, by their nature spontaneous – they often take place in reaction to sudden, shocking or unifying public events. There can be no doubt that this new oppressive administrative framework will drastically reduce the number of protest rallies held in the North (hardly that many) for no discernible public gain.

The planned spectacle of police Land Rovers circling passionate, if only loosely planned protests is objectionable. A police commander counting to 50 under his breath from his vantage point, and sending his constables wading into a peaceful throng to make scores of arrests, all for the sake of insufficient paperwork, is a chilling, looming travesty.

Under the Human Rights Act 1998, all decisions of UK public authorities are subject to the terms and case law of the European Convention on Human Rights – laws and decisions of politicians and office-holders can be quashed if they are incompatible with the precepts of the Convention.

The Convention holds that:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others…no restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society…”

Does the Public Assemblies Bill feel compatible to you? Anyone would imagine human rights law would have been contemplated at the drafting stage.

The question is, were the DUP and Sinn Fein bigwigs involved too customarily thick to consider the human rights implications of their actions, or did they simply not care?

Neither party has any credible legacy of valuing human rights: the hang ‘em all, knee-jerk authoritarianism of the DUP is now working in tandem with the barely-fathomable moral ambiguities of Gerry Adams’s post-ceasefire Sinn Fein. One grew out of waging a devastating war on the state, the other gathered strength as a vehicle for bleak and pitiless whataboutery. It would be madness to trust either with the sane handling of our civil liberties – they had better just keep their grubby fingers off them.

From the student perspective, this bill is potentially disastrous. Direct protesting and picketing have largely died off in recent times; the vast majority of students gladly embrace their ignorant, consumerist, drink-addled cliché-ride though university life, curiously proud in surrendering their lives to the decisions of others.

However fundamental, unacceptable changes to the education system are on the horizon for this year: the noxious cocktail of savage Con-Lib cuts (a 25% cut in the further and higher education budget come October) and default Stormont fecklessness will have a noticeable impact on university life: the cap on fees is likely to be lifted without significant protest and dissent from students.

I would hope at some point in the coming year, for these reasons, we student leaders could summon more than a meagre 50 people in one outside area, registering a righteous fury at such measures. I would hope the state would allow those student leaders to mount a peaceful, public protest under laws happily adhered to in the vast majority of fellow-European states. I would deem a state that doesn’t do this dictatorial.

Wouldn’t you?

(Lorcan Mullen is the new Deputy President of the NUS-USI)

Tags: Gown, Lorcan Mullen, newspaper, Public assemblies, qub, Queen's, queen's university, student, The Gown

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.