LONDON — The London police violated the human rights of the organizers behind a March 2021 vigil for a woman who was killed by a serving police officer as she walked home, the British High Court ruled on Friday, a decision that comes as the government seeks greater authority for the police to block protests.
The judgment comes at a particularly fraught time for London’s Metropolitan Police Service, which is dealing with the resignation of its chief, Cressida Dick, and a broader crisis of trust after allegations of misogyny, racism and bullying within the force.
Reclaim These Streets, the group that had organized the canceled protest after the killing of the woman, Sarah Everard, and took the police force to court, celebrated the decision as “a victory for women.”
“Last March, women’s voices were silenced. Today’s judgment conclusively shows that the police were wrong to silence us,” the organization said in a statement. “The decisions and actions by the Met Police in the run-up to the planned vigil for Sarah Everard last year were unlawful and the judgment sets a powerful precedent for protest rights.”
The decision was announced as Parliament is considering a controversial bill that would make it easier for the police to set limits on demonstrations and punish protesters who refuse to comply.
“The Government should take heed and drop its Policing Bill, which would give the police new powers that undermine our right to protest,” said Bell Ribeiro-Addy, a lawmaker whose constituency includes the area where Ms. Everard was abducted.
The court’s ruling came almost a year to the day after London police cracked down on a group of people who had gathered at a park in South London to remember Ms. Everard, just days after the discovery of her body.
Ms. Everard, 33, was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a Metropolitan Police Service officer, and her case came to encapsulate broader concerns about misogyny in the police force and violence against women and girls.
In response, Reclaim These Streets planned a vigil at Clapham Common. The police banned the event, citing coronavirus restrictions on gatherings that were in place at the time and threatening the organizers with fines of £10,000, about $13,000.
A spontaneous group gathered in the park anyway, quickly growing into the thousands as the day progressed. Although the event was largely peaceful and the crowd was allowed to remain for hours, the police began to disperse the crowd, sometimes violently, as dusk fell.
When several woman were arrested and handcuffed by the police, images of their arrest drew outrage and calls for an investigation into the police handling of the situation.
The ruling announced on Friday focused on the cancellation of the planned vigil, after four organizers — Jessica Leigh, Anna Birley, Henna Shah and Jamie Klingler — challenged the police in court.
The judgment found that the London Police had violated the organizers’ right to freedom of speech and assembly by preventing them from carrying out the vigil.
Judge Mark Warby, in a summary of the ruling, said that the Metropolitan Police Service “failed to perform its legal duty to consider whether the claimants might have a reasonable excuse for holding the gathering.”
He added that the police overstepped by making “statements at meetings, in letters, and in a press statement” that coronavirus regulations in force at the time “meant that holding the vigil would be unlawful.”
“Those statements interfered with the claimants’ rights because each had a ‘chilling effect’ and made at least some causal contribution to the decision to cancel the vigil,” he wrote.
The police have the right to appeal the decision, but Louisa Rolfe, an assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police Service, in a statement issued after the ruling said the force was still deciding whether to pursue the case further.
“The Met is mindful that this judgment has potential implications in other circumstances for how a proportionality assessment is to be carried out when considering enforcement action. This may apply beyond policing the pandemic,” she said. “Even in the context of the regulations that kept us safe during the pandemic, this may have important consequences.”
