The Court of Appeal has in effect upheld as lawful the actions of the police during the May Day demo in Oxford Circus in central London in 2001. You may remember that the police in effect trapped several thousand people in Oxford Circus for a number of hours after they, or most of them, arrived for an unannouced, unlawful demonstration. The police justifed their actions in terms of their fears of violence and damage to property.
In dismissing the Appeal, the judges have upheld Tugendhat J’s ruling at first instance, although their reasoning was somewhat different. In particular, they found that the containment of the demonstrators was not a deprivation of liberty for the pruposes of the Article 5 Convention right, but a mere restriction on freedom of movement, as in the well-known ruling of the ECtHR in Guzzardi. At first blush that seems slightly odd if they agreed with Tugendhat J, as they did (see para. 12 of the Court of Appeal’s judgment), that the containment amounted to imprisonment for the purposes of domestic tort law. It might make more sense if I reflect on it a bit.
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