For anyone wanting to know what happened next about the Royal Wedding/Starbucks Zombie arrests, here it is: we got organised; we found more people who’d suffered the same treatment; we found some brilliant lawyers and we’re going to have a Judicial Review into the Metropolitan Police’s Actions.
Unlike a Private or Civil Law claim (which would have been easier to achieve), this is an investigation which can and will go as high up the chain as is necessary to find out what the policies were and who made what decisions. Private or Civil Law claims would have almost certainly ended up with the police throwing some compensation money at us before we ever got to a judgement – but we, the claimants, said wasn’t about money – we wanted a proper investigation and a judgement at the end of it to set a precedent for future policing.
Today I got the news that we have been granted permission for that Judicial Review. Needless to say I am delighted. Official press release below:
Judicial Review of Preemptive Royal Wedding Arrests
Fifteen people who were arrested preemptively on the day of the Royal Wedding have been granted permission to challenge their arrests by way of Judicial Review. The claimants, who were arrested from different locations across central London, had not committed any crimes. Those arrested included people on their way to peaceful protests, as well as people the police merely suspected of being on their way to protests. None of the claimants were charged and all were released almost as soon as the public celebrations had finished.
“It is our view that the treatment of our clients was unlawful under common law and was in breach of their fundamental rights under the European Court of Human Rights articles 5, 8, 10 and 11,” said a spokesperson from Bhatt Murphy. “The apparent existence of an underlying policy that resulted in those arrests is a matter of considerable concern with implications for all those engaged in peaceful dissent or protest.”
Those arrested include members of the ‘Charing Cross 10’ who were on their way to a republican street party, the ‘Starbucks Zombies’ who were arrested from an Oxford Street branch of Starbucks for wearing zombie fancy dress, and a man who was simply walking in London and was stopped and arrested by plainclothes officers because he was a ‘known activist’. The arrests have been dubbed ‘precrime’ in many circles.
The arrests, all said to be to prevent anticipated breach of the peace, are part of a trend on the part of Metropolitan Police of using increasingly heavy-handed tactics against peaceful protestors, which manifested itself most recently in the threat to use rubber bullets against students protesting against the rise in tuition fees. Such tactics create a ‘chilling effect’ which dissuades others from protesting in the future.
The use of such tactics, which on the day of the royal wedding appears to have gone so far as to include a policy of carrying out preemptive arrests in order to intercept and prevent public protest and other dissent, raises questions of constitutional significance with regard to the role of policing in a democracy. The granting of permission for a Judicial Review means that those tactics will now be subject to the full scrutiny of the High Court in a 5 day hearing some time in the next year.
Bhatt Murphy is a leading civil liberties firm which specialises in police misconduct, prisoners’ rights, deaths in custody and immigration detention.
Hannah Chutzpah 
Good luck!
About time. Welcome to the world that the Working Class and ethnic minorities have known about for years – the UK is a police state.
Good luck.
Both are bad, but it is important to distinguish between the police being violent and being authoritarian. The former is when pain and injury are deliberately inflicted on protesters; the latter is when personal and civil rights are violated. Of course the two can coincide, but here we mainly talking about the latter.