We took the UK government to court to defend the right to protest – and won. Here's what it means

Two years ago, as a lawyer at Liberty, I launched legal action to defend our right to protest and to ensure that governments past and present would not be able to sneak in legislation via the back door that weakens our rights. On Friday (2 May), for the second time, the courts have agreed with us.  

Through this legal action, protests will be able to go ahead without limits being imposed by the police for no good reason, and protesters will not be at risk of arrest for simply walking on the wrong side of the road, blocking hotel entrances or lying down on the pavement outside weapons factories. That this is such a significant victory just demonstrates how much our rights have regressed in recent years. Hundreds of people who were simply trying to make their voices heard should now get their convictions overturned and even more should have their cases thrown out of the criminal justice system.

Protest has always been important to me, ever since I joined a million other people to march against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Politicians refused to listen, but the importance of standing up for what I believed in and making my voice heard stayed with me.  

In court we argued about how laws are made, but at its core this case has always been about protest. In 2023, in pursuit of her anti-protest agenda, then-home secretary Suella Braverman introduced measures which would have lowered the threshold for police intervention in protests wherever they might have a ‘more than minor’ impact. Parliament threw out the changes, but just weeks later, she reintroduced the measures through the back door, by using ‘secondary legislation’ to force them through parliament without scrutiny. All along, we have said this was not only undemocratic, but also unlawful.

We saw the impact of the changes when activist Greta Thunberg was arrested at a protest that had caused ‘more than minor’ disruption to attendees of a fossil fuel conference by delaying their access to the venue by a matter of minutes. Her trial was eventually thrown out of court on the basis that the conditions imposed were so unclear, anyone failing to comply with them was committing no criminal offence.

Last May, the High Court agreed with us that the regulations were unlawful. And just days after it was confirmed that the government were appealing, the general election was announced. I was as surprised as anyone that the new Labour government decided to continue to pursue the Conservatives’ appeal, especially when Yvette Cooper herself had spoken out against these measures as shadow home secretary.

Our victory in the Court of Appeal is a vindication of what we having been saying all along – no minister is above the law.

But this victory sits alongside an increasingly hostile and shrinking space for protesters.

Our right to protest has been under threat from successive governments. The regulations we’ve defeated are just one of many anti-protest laws introduced in recent years which have criminalised protesters and clamped down on the ways we can make our voices heard. In 2022, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act introduced measures as broad as restricting how ‘noisy’ a protest can be, while the Public Order Act 2023 has led to people being convicted for simply being ‘equipped to lock on’, leading to people being arrested at Ascot for having nail glue in their handbags.

These new laws, combined with increasingly harsh sentences for even planning a protest, and a clampdown on free speech in the courtroom which has prevented protesters from mentioning their cause during their trial, has left the right to protest under threat.

The highest number of protesters ever spent Christmas in prison, and even more measures are going through parliament, including bans on face coverings at protests that would make it unsafe for disabled activists and political dissidents to protest. The protesters who came before us continue to stand in Parliament Square where protesters of today cannot without permission from those they are protesting against.

Protest is a fundamental right and the cornerstone of our democracy. It must not be undermined by governments who want to shut down the ways we hold them to account. We hope this ruling makes the government take stock and take a different direction that respects protest rights, instead of stripping them away further. 

Katy Watts is a lawyer at human rights lawyers Liberty and a Big Issue Changemaker for 2025.

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