CASE STUDIES

CASE STUDY 1: Freedom of Speech

PARLIAMENT WEB SITE: 12 May 2021

A historic bill introduced in Parliament today (12 May) will strengthen the legal
duties on higher education providers in England to protect freedom of speech on
campuses up and down the country, for students, academics and visiting
speakers. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill will bring in new
measures that will require universities and colleges registered with the Office for
Students to defend free speech and help stamp out unlawful ‘silencing’.
For the first time, these legal duties will also be extended to students’ unions,
which, under the measures in the Bill, will have to take reasonably practicable
steps to ensure lawful freedom of speech.
This delivers on a manifesto commitment to strengthen academic freedom and
free speech in higher education and will help protect the reputation of our
universities as centres of academic freedom.
…The Bill comes in light of examples of a ‘chilling effect’ on students, staff and
invited speakers feeling unable to speak out. In one incident, Bristol Middle East
Forum was charged almost £500 in security costs to invite the Israeli Ambassador
to speak at an event. In another example, over one hundred academics signed a
letter expressing public opposition to Professor Nigel Biggar’s research project
‘Ethics and Empire’, because he had said that British people should have ‘pride as
well as shame’ in the Empire.
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EXTRACT FROM BBC ARTICLE 2018
 CASE STUDY 2: NAOMIE CAMPBELL (p 46 in textbook)

CASES STUDY 3: Right to protest: Focus on the Policing and Crime Bill

Here are some extracts from the Pressure Group ‘Liberty’ on the Policing and Crime Bill 2021

Over the last 35 years, the State has been vested with significant powers to
regulate protest. Police have wide powers to impose conditions on both static
assemblies and marches, as well as broad discretion in how those powers are
applied. While Policing Minister Kit Malthouse MP recently affirmed that “the
right to peaceful protest is a fundamental tool of civic expression”, and promised
that protest “will never be curtailed by this government”,3 the Police, Crime,
Sentencing and Courts Bill seeks to do exactly that
Previously, a senior police officer could only impose the following three
conditions that alter a) the place at which an assembly could be held b) its
maximum duration or c) the maximum number of persons who constitute it.
The Bill expands the reasons for which a senior police officer may impose
conditions on protests by expanding the potential consequence of a protest that
would warrant police intervention. Clauses 54-55 and 60 subsection 2 introduce
“noise generated by persons taking part” as a reason to warrant police-imposed
conditions if that noise “may result in serious disruption to the activities of an
organisation which are carried out in the vicinity” and also, for static assemblies
and marches, if that noise “may have a relevant impact on persons in the vicinity
[…] and that impact is significant.”