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Over 40 legal experts demand probe into Met's policing of Palestine demonstration

OVER 40 legal experts have signed a letter to the Home Secretary demanding an independent investigation into the Met’s policing of London’s pro-Palestine protest at the weekend.

Saturday’s rally was met with a heavy-handed police presence which saw the arrest of 77 protesters — the most at any national demonstration for Palestine. 

The protest had already been marred by disruption after the Met reneged on a previous agreement to allow a march from the BBC HQ to Whitehall, a route taken several times before. 

March organisers said that officers sought to impose a route that the pro-Israel Board of Deputies claimed it had proposed to the police.

In the end, the Met allowed a static rally at Whitehall.

Organisers said there were a “series of complex restrictions” preventing people from assembling at Whitehall at various times, which resulted in arrests on “ flimsy pretexts including simply for inadvertently standing in this central area at the wrong time.”

The Met claims that protesters broke through police lines in a co-ordinated effort to breach the conditions.

But protest organisers backed by video footage contest this, stating that a small delegation, including an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, who were seeking permission to lay flowers, were invited through. 

Among those arrested was Stop the War’s Chris Nineham, chief steward of the protest, who has since been banned from attending demonstrations as part of his bail conditions.

Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign which helped organise the protest, was also subsequently charged with offences under the Public Order Act. 

The day after the protest, Met Police Chief Mark Rowley boasted to the Board of Deputies that he had “used conditions on the protests more than we ever have done before,” and that his officers had imposed “sharper and stronger conditions” on march organisers.

In a letter to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, the lawyers said the Met’s approach was a “disproportionate, unwarranted and dangerous assault on the right to assembly and protest,” and called for an independent inquiry.

Dr Paul O’Connell, reader in Law at SOAS University of London said: “Freedom to assemble and protest is the very lifeblood of a democratic society. 

“If people protesting the commission of a genocide in Gaza are not safe to do so, then it bodes ill for individual freedom and democratic life in Britain in the 21st century.

“The Home Secretary, and anyone else in a position of authority, has an obligation to act now, to make sure that the law and police tactics in Britain protect and facilitate the right to protest, as required by regional and international human rights treaties to which Britain is a party.”

 

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