Human Rights Watch warns right to protest 'under attack' in UK

London: Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned Thursday that the UK has “severely restricted the right to protest” in recent years and was expanding “repressive measures” against peaceful demonstrators.

A report titled “‘Silencing the Streets’: The Right to Protest Under Attack in the UK,” comes a few weeks after Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was arrested and then released at a London protest in support of the Palestine Action group, banned under UK anti-terror laws.

“The UK is now adopting protest-control tactics imposed in countries where democratic safeguards are collapsing,” HRW researcher Lydia Gall said.

“The Labour government has taken a deeply alarming direction on protest rights and appears to be determined to suppress these rights further,” the rights organisation said in a press release.

According to the HRW research from 2024 and 2025, protesters were “increasingly detained, charged and in some cases sentenced” to multi-year jail terms for non-violent actions including for attending meetings to plan action.

The previous Conservative government brought in sweeping changes to protest laws in 2023 to prevent “disruptive” tactics often used by climate protesters, such as slow walking on roads disrupting traffic or attaching themselves to objects and buildings.

Some of these actions, the HRW report says, would in the past only have resulted in fines or suspended sentences.

“The UK’s anti-protest laws create a chilling effect on the right to peaceful assembly,” the report said, condemning Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government for failing to overturn the legislation.

Yasmine Ahmed, UK director of HRW, told AFP she believed it was all down to the government’s efforts to appear tough on law and order.

But she was “very surprised” about these measures as Starmer was a prominent human rights lawyer.

“This UK government has not only failed to repeal legislation that the last government enacted, which severely restricts the right to peaceful protest, but has in fact supercharged it and imposed further restrictions,” she said.

She said she was concerned about the “precedent this is setting for future governments”.

In the future such tough laws might not be used against “climate protesters” or those “protesting about genocides … it could be about anyone that the government disagrees with.”

A crime and policing bill currently in parliament would introduce new protest restrictions, including expanding police powers to ban demonstrators from wearing face coverings.

Among its recommendations, HRW urged the UK government to repeal certain restrictions and reverse the ban on Palestine Action.

Since it was proscribed in July, at least 2,300 people have been arrested for showing support for Palestine Action according to protest organisers.