Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005
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The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA) is an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament aimed primarily at creating the Serious Organised Crime Agency. It was introduced into the House of Commons on 24 November 2004 and was passed by Parliament and given Royal Assent in April 2005.
The Act is controversial primarily for an additional, entirely unrelated provision, which restricts the right to demonstrate within an exclusion zone of up to one kilometre from any point in Parliament Square. Demonstrators have to apply to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police six days in advance, or if this is not reasonably practicable then no less than 24 hours in advance.
The area itself is defined by a Statutory Instrument rather than the Act. It specifically excludes Trafalgar Square, a traditional site of protest on the northern boundary of the area. Apart from Parliament it also includes Whitehall, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Middlesex Guildhall, New Scotland Yard, and the Home Office. It also covers a sliver of land on the other bank of the River Thames, including County Hall, the Jubilee Gardens, St Thomas' Hospital and the London Eye.
Measures to introduce a specific offence of "incitement to religious hatred" were included in early drafts of the Act, but then dropped in order to get the bill passed before the UK general election, 2005. (The offence has since been created as the Racial and Religious Hatred Act.)
[edit] Changes to powers of arrest
The Act introduced changes to the powers of arrest utilised by both the police and public. The term arrestable offence ceased to have effect as, bar a few preserved exemptions, one power of arrest now applies to all offences. Where the threshold of an arrestable offence was previously used to enable specific powers of search or powers to delay certain entitlements, these powers are preserved, but the threshold is changed to that of an indictable offence.
For police officers, one or more of the following criteria now have to be fulfilled before an arrest can be made.
- To enable the name of the person in question to be ascertained (in the case where the constable does not know, and cannot readily ascertain, the person's name, or has reasonable grounds for doubting whether a name given by the person as his name is his "real name")
- As reason 1 but in respect of the person's address
- To prevent the person in question:
- Causing physical injury to themself or any other person
- Suffering physical injury
- Causing loss of or damage to property
- Committing an offence against public decency
- Causing an unlawful obstruction of the highway
- To protect a child or other vulnerable person from the person being arrested
- To allow the prompt and effective investigation of the offence or of the conduct of the person being arrested
- To prevent any prosecution for the offence from being hindered by the disappearance of the person being arrested
Given the scope of the last two provisions, a new Code of Practice was issued for guidance.
These changes were enacted on 1 January 2006.
[edit] Protests near Parliament
These provisions of the Act are widely believed to have been introduced as a result of Brian Haw, a peace campaigner, who has since 1 June 2001 protested against Britain and the USA's policy towards Iraq. He uses placards and a loudspeaker to get his message across, which some British MPs find disruptive. Patrick Cormack MP said in a Parliamentary debate on 7 February 2005 that the lives of "members of staff in Portcullis House and 1 Parliament Street, as well as the police who are on duty at Members entrance day after day … are made intolerable by those people baying away, without a crowd to address, merely repeating themselves ad nauseam."
However, others, such as Jeremy Corbyn MP disagreed, saying "The Minister should think carefully about removing rights that are enshrined in our history," and Glenda Jackson MP agreed with him. "I regard it as the voice of democracy", she said.
Lembit Öpik MP drew attention to the comments of the Prime Minister Tony Blair, who, on 7 April 2002, said: "When I pass protestors every day at Downing Street... I may not like what they call me, but I thank God they can. That's called freedom."
The legislation initially appeared ineffective against Mr Haw. The High Court of Justice ruled that as Haw's protest had begun in June 2001 he wasn't required to get authorisation. The three-strong judicial panel accepted arguments by Mr Haw's lawyers that the law only applied to new demonstrations taking place after it came into force, not those which had been in progress for some time.[1] However, on 8 May 2006, this decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal.[2][3]
On August 1, the day that the Act came into force, the Stop the War Coalition and others organised a protest against the prohibition. They pointedly did not ask for permission. The action attracted some 200 people according to reports — among them Lauren Booth, Tony Blair's sister-in-law — and saw five people arrested.
The first conviction under the Act was in December 2005, when Maya Evans was convicted for reading the names of British soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in the Iraq War, under the Cenotaph in October, without police permission. [4]
[edit] External links
- Full text of the act
- Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Designated Area) Order 2005
- Map of the Designated Area
- Peace Campaigner Brian Haw's website
- Parliament Protest blog monitoring resistance to the restrictions on demonstrations in the vicinity of Parliament
- TheyWorkForYou.com - Transcript of Debate in Parliament
- Henry Porter, The Guardian, 6 November 2005, "A law the Stasi would have loved"
- "Peoples' Commons"
