Free speech and peaceful assembly aren’t – or at least shouldn’t be – too difficult to understand. You need to be allowed to write or say what you like, and meet who you like, without worrying who you offend. However, this must stop short of assaulting people, deliberately and forcibly stopping them going about their business or interfering with their right to use their private property as they think fit.
The second of these ideas should be uncontroversial. Whatever you think about free speech, who could be against protection of private property and the rights of the just-about-managing with livings to make and a disinclination to see their routines thrown willy-nilly into chaos in the cause of someone else’s quarrel? Actually, quite a lot of people. Meet the apparatchiks from the United Nations and their hangers-on, who – at least as regards those who agree with their progressive world view – are seriously unhappy about these protections for ordinary people and ordinary life.
At the beginning of last year, for example, the grandly-named ‘Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders’ from the UN named Michel Forst paid a flying visit to London. Shortly afterwards, he produced a report saying that it was ‘extremely worrying’ that steps were being taken to rein in the excesses of Just Stop Oil in deliberately disrupting ordinary life. It was, he fulminated, quite wrong to punish them on the basis that streets were for people to use rather than for activists to block, to stop them telling juries to acquit on the basis that climate change mattered more than piddling laws about private property, or for courts to issue injunctions against plainly illegal activities when these were undertaken in pursuit of the environmentalist imperative.
The issue arose again last month. Cambridge University, much troubled by disruption from pro-Palestine protesters unhappy with its investment policies, sought a court injunction to prevent them trespassing on its property and disrupting degree ceremonies. It got it in the end (though in a very limited form). But what is interesting is that a few days earlier, one Gina Romero, UN ‘Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Association and Peaceful Assembly’, had written officially to Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice essentially ordering her to back off. The letter, available here, was a model of impertinence and self-righteousness. Addressed simply to ‘Mr Vice-Chancellor’ (sic), it informed her that under ‘international standards’, campus assemblies:
Should be guaranteed and protected wherever they take place (outdoors, indoors, online; in public and private spaces; or a combination thereof), and regardless of their forms (demonstrations, protests, meetings, processions, rallies, sit-ins, candlelit vigils and flash mobs, civil disobedience campaigns, camps, etc.), whether they are stationary or mobile.
It then insisted that demonstrators ‘should be left to determine whether they want to use posters, megaphones, musical instruments or other technical means, such as projection equipment, to convey their message’, and added that for activists universities had to permit for activists ‘the temporary erection of structures, including sound systems, to reach their audience and achieve their purpose’.
This is not an isolated incident. At the end of last year, the same Gina Romero had, on UN notepaper, issued recommendations to universities generally, apparently throughout the world, insisting that campus demonstrations counted as peaceful and legitimate provided they ‘did not entail the use by participants of physical force against others that was likely to result in injury or death, or serious damage to property’, and that ‘disruption of daily activities and/ or ordinary life, including pedestrian and/or vehicular movement, cannot be considered as act of violence and therefore do not remove the protection of these acts under the right to peaceful assembly’.
It’s difficult to know where to start with this. For one thing, demands of this sort effectively amount to telling universities to give an open licence to student demonstrators to prevent their institutions functioning, provided it’s all in a good progressive cause like climate change or Palestinian self-determination (it would be interesting to see what Romero would say about the need to respect the rights of, say, anti-abortion activists to disrupt academic life, but let that pass). It’s hard to see how setting up camps and deploying megaphones, sound systems and flash mobs on private college property will not frustrate and disenfranchise those whose only desire is to teach and study quietly.
For another, all this cynically upends the idea of peaceful protest. The reason why we have always said peaceful protest needs to be allowed is precisely that it is persuasive and not coercive: that it affords people the right to choose whether to go along with the protesters or ignore them. The idea put forward by the likes of Romero, that this is a fuddy-duddy view and student protesters need to be allowed to cause serious disruption to academic institutions and the activities of people in them to make sure they listen, provided only they stop short of punching people on the nose or burning the place down, turns this idea on its head. It is essentially telling colleges that they must stand by and allow what may be a small minority to force its views on people and bypass their right to make their own decisions.
Doubly cheeky is the clothing of all this in a cloak of self-righteous officiality. The suggestion that anyone who does not go along with these ideas is infringing ‘international standards’ is all very well, until you realise where they come from. These standards are as often as not set up by the same coterie of Left-liberal UN apparatchiks, human rights lawyers and progressive activists that later promote them as agreed rules that no decent person could dissent from.
There is one answer to people of this sort when they seek to interfere in events such as those at Cambridge. They need to be politely told that in this country, we are perfectly aware of the nature of peaceful protest and that we allow it, but how institutions manage what goes on within their own property is frankly none of their business. To her credit, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and her management team seem to have done just this to Romero. Good for them. Let us hope more follow their example.
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