Met police accused of ‘assault on right to protest’ after tenfold rise in nuisance law arrests | Metropolitan police
The police in London were accused of abuse of their forces to prevent protests after the research, found that less than 3% of the arrests for conspiracy to cause a public boredom every last five years.
Since 2019, the research has been almost ten times in the number of arrests in the capital for the crime used to target activists since 2019, when climate has launched a wave of climate activism.
Campaigns, the findings, the protesters, protesters by making a preliminary hearing, implementing the conditions of laborious bail and collecting DNA and fingerprints to protesters to protest the law to protest the law, he said.
However, the police said that “the protest is the task of intervening in places where the line is guilty” and the difference in the evidence thresholds between the arrest and burden explained the inconsistency in the research.
Areeba Hamid, the co -director of Greenpeace UK, who conducted the research, said, “The fact that the police have routinely dragged the protesters from the streets for a crime, almost always they cannot blame them with an attack on the right to abuse and protest.
“It is a frightening development in any democracy because they are politically inappropriate, it is a frightening development in any democracy, and it is a direct result of the government’s closing the free speech and preventing people from preventing people from preventing the problems they care about.”
In general, the conspiracy crime in order to cause a public boredom includes a group of people who agreed to take part in an action where a group of people have occurred, whether serious harm, deterioration or the people may prevent the people.
Since 2022, when the crime was legally placed, he was sentenced to up to 10 years of imprisonment. One of the most serious protest crimes and used to condemn four oil activists who were imprisoned for up to five years last year-the longest sentence so far for the protest that does not contain violence.
Greenpeace used demands of freedom of information to find out how many people have been arrested on suspicion of committing a crime between 2012-2025. Between 2012 and 2018, they found that 67 arrests were made with eight or 12% accusations.
In 2019, he brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets to protest the climate deterioration on Fridays and Fridays for the future. From then on March 2025, there were a total of 638 arrests that caused only 18-2.8% under power to go to court.
Raj Chada, a partner of Hodge Jones & Allen, a law firm, one of the leading protest defense lawyers of the UK, said he was not surprised by the figures. “In the last days of the XR, there was a major growth in arrests for public disorders… Previously, he was arrested for the blocking of the highway and the majority of these cases did not go anywhere.”
Chada said that only the crime that existed under common laws, the arrest and detention of protesters and DNA, fingerprints and photographs – gave power to take forces they were not under smaller public order crimes.
“This was a way for police control, because you can put people more easily bail conditions to prevent them from coming to the center of London, and you can potentially detain people,” he said.
“You encounter them for a few months, you wait until the XR action is over, and then you don’t move better or charging a smaller crime, such as clogging the motorway.”
After a stagnation in the protest during the Covid pandemi, he was arrested against the conspiracy to cause public discomfort with the British campaign in 2021.
Greenpeace’s data showed that in 2021, the metropolitan police made 272 arrests under power, because the protesters disrupted the traffic on the roads of the capital’s orbit motorway M25. No accusation was made that year.
The following year, as part of a wider legislative pressure against the protest, the crime was legally placed by the police, the Crime Penalty and Courts Law 2022, Chada’s prosecutors made it easier for the accusations to bring accusations, he said.
However, except for 12 cases of the Law, including Roger Hallam and his friend, they have given serious penalties on their plans to prevent M25, since no one has been blamed within the legislation.
Tim Crosland, Director of the Environmental Case Charity Institution Plan B, which campaigns on behalf of the protesters facing the prosecution, confirms that we have witnessed directly for the last few years.
“This allows the police to seize phones and laptops and make dawn raids to those who use their democratic rights by opening the search and seizure forces within the scope of the law of the police and the police and the penalty.
MET Police said: “The threshold of arrest is a reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred. There is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect in the court, a person, a person, to cause a public distress, because it is limited to cause this standard, this is therefore sufficient evidence to prove that there is a limited accusation.
