Andrew Tettenborn

Authorities encountering the kind of civil disorder that has marked the last few days in Britain are best advised to keep a cool head and quietly deploy the powers of the ordinary law to face it down. Unfortunately there are worrying signs that this is not happening. The announcement from the Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson that the Crown Prosecution Service favours on occasion invoking terrorism laws against those co-ordinating the unrest, is a case in point. True, in doing this the CPS would be strictly within its rights. In law, any action designed to influence the government and involving violence or serious damage to property with intent to advance a political cause is regarded as terrorism.

Yesterday evening, the government instituted a little-known procedure called the Additional Courts Protocol. Set up following the 2011 London riots, this involves emergency ad hoc magistrates’ courts sitting 24 hours a day to deal swiftly with the troublemakers.  This was the right decision. But it still may come back to bite the people who made it. It’s not difficult to see the advantages. Quick justice, bypassing the usual bureaucracy and reducing the scope for suggestions that witnesses’ memory may have faded, may well give offenders a salutary shock: the prospect of it can concentrate minds in future.

Universities fought tooth and nail against plans to impose fines if they failed to uphold freedom of speech. That proposal – contained in last year’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – was one of the few things the Tory government could point to as a success. But under Labour the plan has been shelved. It's a good day for universities; a bad day for anyone who cares about free speech on campus. This bleak episode neatly sums up Labour’s attitude to higher education Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said that the ministerial order, which was required to bring into force the relevant parts of the new law, would be delayed. She told the Commons, with obvious pleasure, she was ready to 'consider options, including repeal.' In short, the Act is dead.

The prison sentences passed on the Just Stop Oil protesters who immobilised the M25 – five years for Roger Hallam and four for the others – were certainly stiff. With prisons overflowing and some violent offenders receiving less harsh sentences, a small reduction in the jail terms might have been justified. But despite the backlash from environmentalists, justice has been served. Those who say that the protesters are merely conscientious practitioners of civil disobedience – and that the punishments imposed amount to a stamping on the right of peaceful protest – are wrong.  Roger Hallam’s casting of himself in the role of a civil disobedience advocate is both disingenuous and incorrect.

'Britain is evolving from a democracy towards a kritarchy – the rule of lawyers,' wrote Ross Clark in today’s Spectator magazine. His gloomy prediction has been proved correct almost immediately. A 3-2 majority in the Supreme Court today put the emergency brakes on long-standing plans to extract oil at Horse Hill in Surrey when it struck down the council’s necessary grant of planning permission. As with most legal decisions, the reasoning was convoluted. But in essence it was this: the court ruled that the environmental impact of emissions from burning fossil fuels must be considered in planning applications for new extraction projects, not just the impacts of the emissions produced in extracting them.

On Friday, the High Court in Northern Ireland deflected a serious threat to the right to free speech, not only in the province but also in the country as a whole. It was, however, a very close-run thing, and the affair is still highly worrying. A Northern Ireland Assembly law that came into effect last year, the Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2022, made it an imprisonable crime to publish the fact that someone had come under police investigation for a sexual offence unless and until they were charged. If they were never charged the matter had to be hushed up until 25 years after their death (or even longer, if a court agreed to their relatives’ request). As I pointed out at the end of last year, this law was incredibly wide-ranging.

The Georgian parliament has rammed through its new foreign agents law amid massive protests, overriding the veto of pro-western and pro-EU president Salome Zourabichvili. The new law essentially will require all non-commercial organisations operating in Georgia to register as foreign agents and publicise themselves as such if they receive over 20 per cent of their funding from abroad. Its aim is to counter the influence of pro-western NGOs in the country. The Georgian government has a point when it defends the requirement of registration as a transparency measure The proposal has already caused serious unrest, and this will undoubtedly now balloon. You can see why. The government led by ruling party Georgian Dream is not a pleasant grouping.