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Warburton Expat's avatar

We know how these protesters would react to speech differing from theirs, since we've seen how the same people wanted police to smash heads during anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination, neonazi etc protests. The left are not friendly to dissent.

I don't mind that the protests are disruptive. That's generally the point of protests. But I think it'd be reasonable for universities to have the police issue move on orders to protesters who were not staff or students. Likewise, universities ought to be able to fail students and sack staff for lack of attendance to lectures etc. Nor are universities obliged to provide food and sanitary facilities to camping-out students, indeed if the staff and students make a mess, the universities should be able to get financial redress for this; certainly if a group of students (for example) broke the window of the student building cafe because they were having a drunken party they'd be charged for it, it should be no different because it happened sober during a protest.

And of course we have well-established law about making threats, incitement to violence and so on, which can and should be used to deal with people going beyond ordinarily offensive, stupid or wrong speech and into those other areas.

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[insert here] delenda est's avatar

As soon as one physically blocks another from using public or private land and facilities other than one's own, perhaps leaving to one side picket lines, one is far beyond any legal protection for freedom of assembly, à fortiori speech.

In my basically irrelevant and quite humble opinion, that UK decision was with all due respect quite wrongfully decided (notwithstanding the much smarter and more learned judges who so decided) in a way that unfortunately reflects very poorly on the law. The twisting anf turning around the proper appellate review of proportionality was important, but seems to have obscured the more important issue as to whether such a protest could be proportional under the EHRC.

The poor Divisional Court judge has grounds to be aggrieved!

Happily Australian judges tend to be more (judicially) conservative (and Australian parliaments have never passed anything like the horrible EHCR). Accordingly I hope, am indeed confident, that Australian senior appellate courts would not indulge such broad deference to a statute with no historical or structural basis for it.

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