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The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Hannah Thomas's injury sparks questions over NSW protester rights. What does the law say?
The altercation between police and protesters that left Hannah Thomas in hospital with a serious eye injury has reanimated a perennial issue in New South Wales – the right to protest. The former Greens candidate, who ran against Anthony Albanese in the seat of Grayndler at the federal election, was charged alongside four others after attending a protest in Sydney outside a business allegedly involved in supplying services for parts used in Israeli jets (which the company denies). She has blamed the NSW government's 'draconian anti-protest laws' for her injury, claiming they have 'emboldened' the police in interactions with protesters. NSW police said after a preliminary review of body-worn video of her arrest that there was no information to indicate misconduct. Here are the basics of the protest laws in NSW, and how they have changed. There is not an express right to protest in NSW, but it's covered in common law and by the Australian constitution, which the high court has found implies the right to freedom of political communication. Governments cannot create laws that significantly impede this right. However, there are many laws that critics claim have eroded it. Courts can overturn such laws if they are found to be constitutionally invalid, and have done so. Tim Roberts, the president of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, says a protest itself cannot be considered unlawful. However, an individual protester can be charged with an offence based on their conduct during the protest – for example, if they fail to comply with a move-on direction by police. No. However, protest organisers can apply to police ahead of time using a Notice of Intention to Hold a Public Assembly – commonly known as the 'form 1' process. Protesters submit the form to NSW police outlining details such as which roads the protest intends to march along. It is not mandatory for organisers to use this process. But if they do, and police accept the details on the form, protesters can be protected from being charged. If police oppose the form 1, a court has the final say. Earlier this year, the court sided with police after they knocked back a form 1 submitted by the climate group Rising Tide, which planned to blockade the Newcastle port. Organisers went ahead with the protest regardless. The court decision simply meant the protesters were not protected from being charged under protest laws if, for example, they obstructed a major facility, or failed to comply with a move-on direction. Police move-on powers are limited if the protest has an approved form 1. For protests that don't – which tend to be snap protests – the Law Enforcement Powers and Responsibilities Act (Lepra) states that police may issue a move-on order if protesters obstruct traffic or a person poses a 'serious risk' to someone else's safety. But in February police powers were expanded in laws that one Labor MP reportedly described during an internal meeting as the most 'draconian' change to protest law in decades. Under the change, police can issue a move on-order if a protest is taking place near a place of worship. The protest does not need to be directed at the place of worship or even about religion. The legislation does not define 'near' – this is at the police's discretion. Sites in Sydney where protests commonly take place, such as Town Hall and Hyde Park – are close to places of worship. Police are required to give a move-on direction as a first warning. If a protester does not comply, they can be arrested and charged. This law has been mired in controversy. It was passed as part of a suite of reforms aimed at curbing antisemitism – and which are now the subject of an inquiry exploring whether parliament was misled before passing the laws. The catalyst for the laws was not a religious event, but a protest outside a synagogue at which a member of the Israel Defense Forces was speaking. It is also facing a constitutional challenge from the Palestine Action Group. Other laws have been introduced in recent years, primarily to target climate protests. In 2022, the then NSW Liberal government legislated – with support from Labor – a maximum penalty of two years in prison and a $22,000 fine for protesters who obstruct facilities such as ports and transport hubs. The penalty also applies to protests on main roads. This was passed in response to a protest by the climate group Blockade Australia. David Mejia-Canales, a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, says people feel they must get permission for a protest, even though that is not the case. He says this feeds into language used by police such as a protest being 'unauthorised'. 'In New South Wales, the anti-protest regime is probably the most dire in the country,' he says. He says this is for multiple compounding reasons, including that NSW has more anti-protest laws than any other state. NSW also has the second highest maximum financial penalty for obstructing main roads and major facilities – South Australia has the highest maximum financial penalty at $50,0000. Mejia-Canales also says the laws are 'broad and vague', which makes it a challenge for protesters to know whether or not they broke the law. Police have been given a lot of discretionary power over applying protest law and also via the form 1 system, he adds. The centre has argued more than 49 laws introduced by federal and state governments over the past two decades have eroded the right to protest. Its report found NSW had introduced more laws than any other jurisdiction. Since the report was released last year, the Minns government has introduced two more laws – an offence of blocking railways, enacted after Blockade Australia shut down train lines in Newcastle, and the law around protests near places of worship. Roberts says successive state governments have increasingly reacted to protest movements – particularly climate and now the pro-Palestine movements – by introducing more legislation. He argues that place of worship changes are so broad that it is unclear to a protester whether they are in breach or not. Chris Minns says there is a balance to be struck between the right to protest and the rights of non-protesters, and that doing so is often difficult. 'Like big cities right around the world, you do have to deal with everybody's right to enjoy their city, to go to church, to go to a mosque, to enjoy recreation on the weekends free from harassment or vilification, alongside the public's right to protest,' the premier told reporters. In February, Minns said he did not believe the broad nature of the laws restricting protests near places of worship had left them open to misuse. 'We do put a lot of trust in NSW police, and I believe that they exercise it judiciously,' he said.
BBC News
24-06-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Indira Gandhi's Emergency: When democracy was put on pause in India
At midnight on 25 June 1975, India - a young democracy and the world's largest - prime minister Indira Gandhi had just declared a nationwide Emergency. Civil liberties were suspended, opposition leaders jailed, the press gagged, and the constitution turned into a tool of absolute executive power. For the next 21 months, India was technically still a democracy but functioned like anything trigger? A bombshell verdict by the Allahabad High Court had found Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice and invalidated her 1971 election win. Facing political disqualification and a rising wave of street protests led by veteran socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan, Gandhi chose to declare an "internal emergency" under Article 352 of the constitution, citing threats to national historian Srinath Raghavan notes in his new book on Indira Gandhi, the constitution did allow wide-ranging powers during an Emergency. But what followed was "extraordinary and unprecedented strengthening of executive power... untrammelled by judicial scrutiny".Over 110,000 people were arrested, including major opposition political figures such as Morarji Desai, Jyoti Basu and LK Advani. Bans were slapped on groups from the right-wing to the far-left. Prisons were overcrowded and torture was courts, stripped of independence, offered little resistance. In Uttar Pradesh, which jailed the highest number of detainees, not a single detention order was overturned. "No citizen could move the courts for enforcement of their fundamental rights," writes a controversial family planning campaign, an estimated 11 million Indians were sterilised - many by coercion. Though officially state-run, the programme was widely believed to be orchestrated by Sanjay Gandhi, the unelected son of Indira Gandhi. Many believe a shadowy second government, led by Sanjay, wielded unchecked power behind the poor were hit hardest. Cash incentives for surgery often equalled a month's income or more. In one Delhi neighbourhood near the Uttar Pradesh border - derisively dubbed "Castration Colony" (places where forced sterilisation programmes took place) - women reportedly said they'd been made bewas (widows) by the state as "our men are no longer men". Police in Uttar Pradesh alone recorded over 240 violent incidents tied to the their book on Delhi under Emergency, civil-rights activist John Dayal and journalist Ajoy Bose wrote that officials were under intense pressure to meet sterilisation quotas. Junior officers enforced the order ruthlessly - contract labourers were told, "No advances, no jobs, unless you get vasectomies." Parallel to this, a massive urban "clean-up" demolished nearly 120,000 slums, displacing some 700,000 people in Delhi alone, as part of a gentrification campaign described by critics as social cleansing. These people were dumped into new "resettlement colonies" far away from their workplaces. One of the worst episodes of slum demolitions occurred in Delhi's Turkman Gate, a Muslim-majority neighbourhood, where police fired on protesters resisting demolition, killing at least six and displacing press was silenced overnight. On the eve of the Emergency, power to newspaper presses in Delhi was cut. By morning, censorship was law. When The Indian Express newspaper finally published its 28 June edition - delayed by a power outage - it left a blank space where its editorial should have been. The Statesman followed suit, printing blank columns to signal censorship. Even The National Herald, founded by India's first prime minister and Indira Gandhi's father Jawaharlal Nehru, quietly dropped its masthead slogan: "Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might." Shankar's Weekly, a satirical magazine known for its cartoons, shut down her book - a personal history of the Emergency - journalist Coomi Kapoor reveals the extent of media censorship through detailed examples of blackout orders. These included bans on reporting or photographing slum demolitions in Delhi, conditions in a maximum-security Tihar Jail, and developments in opposition-ruled states like Tamil Nadu. Coverage of the family planning drive was tightly controlled - no "adverse comments or editorials" were permitted. Even stories deemed trivial or embarrassing were scrubbed: no "sensational" reporting on a notorious bandit and no mention of a Bollywood actress caught shoplifting in also notes that BBC's Mark Tully, along with journalists from The Times, Newsweek and The Daily Telegraph, were given 24 hours to leave India for refusing to sign a "censorship agreement". (Years after the Emergency, when Gandhi was back in power, Tully introduced her to the BBC's chief. He asked how it felt to lose public support. She smiled and said, "I never lost the support of the people, only the people were misled by rumours, many of which were spread by the BBC.")Some judges pushed back. The Bombay and Gujarat high courts warned that censorship couldn't be used to "brainwash the public". But that resistance was quickly drowned out. That wasn't all. In July 1976, Sanjay Gandhi pushed the Youth Congress - the governing Congress party's youth wing - to adopt his personal five-point programme, including family planning, tree plantation, refusal of dowry, promotion of adult literacy and abolition of caste. Congress president DK Barooah instructed all state and local committees to implement Sanjay's five points alongside the government's official 20-point programme, effectively merging state policy with Sanjay's personal Emma Tarlo, author of a richly detailed ethnographic work of the period, wrote that during the Emergency, the poor were subjected to "forced choices". It was also a turning point for industrial relations. "The last vestiges of working-class politics were imperiously wiped out," wrote Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil in their book on the period they call "India's first dictatorship". Around 2,000 trade union leaders and members were jailed, strikes were banned and worker benefits were slashed. The number of man-days lost to stoppages plunged - from 33.6 million in 1974 to just 2.8 million in 1976. Strikers dropped from 2.7 million to half a million. The government also loosened its grip on the private sector, helping the economy rebound after years of stagnation. Industrialist JRD Tata praised the regime's "refreshingly pragmatic and result-oriented approach".Despite its heavy-handedness, the Emergency was seen by some as a period of order and efficiency. Inder Malhotra, a journalist, wrote that in "its initial months at least, the Emergency restored to India a kind of calm it had not known for years".Trains ran on time, strikes vanished, production rose, crime fell, and prices dropped after a good 1975 monsoon - bringing much-needed stability. "One fact is conclusive proof of the quiescence of the middle class - that hardly any officials resigned in protest against the Emergency," writes historian Ramachandra Guha in his book India After Gandhi. Scholars believe the Emergency's harshest measures were largely confined to northern India because southern states had stronger regional parties and more resilient civil societies that limited central overreach. Gandhi's Congress party, which ruled federally, had weaker control in the south, giving regional leaders greater autonomy to resist or moderate draconian policies. The Emergency formally ended in March 1977 after Gandhi called elections - and lost. The new Janata government - a rag-tag coalition of parties - rolled back many of the laws she'd passed. But the deeper damage was done. As many historians have written, the Emergency revealed how easily democratic structures could be hollowed out from within - even legally."It is no wonder that the Emergency is remembered emotively in India... Indira's suspension of constitutional rights appears as an abrupt disavowal of the liberal-democratic spirit that animated Nehru and other nationalist leaders who founded India as a constitutional republic in 1950," historian Gyan Prakash wrote in his book on the the Emergency is remembered in India as a brief authoritarian interlude - an aberration. But that framing, warns Prakash, breeds "a smug confidence in the present". "It tells us that the past is really past, it is over, it is history. The present is free from its burdens. India's democracy, we are told, heroically recovered from Indira's brief misadventure with no lasting damage and with no enduring, unaddressed problems in its functioning," Prakash writes."Underlying it is an impoverished conception of democracy, one that regards it only in terms of certain forms and procedures."In other words, this perception ignores how fragile democracy can be when institutions fail to hold power to account. The Emergency was also a stark warning against the perils of hero worship - something embodied in the towering political persona of Indira Gandhi. Back in 1949, BR Ambedkar, architect of the constitution, cautioned Indians against surrendering their freedoms to a "great leader".Bhakti (devotion), he said, was acceptable in religion - but in politics, it was "a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship".
Globe and Mail
24-06-2025
- Politics
- Globe and Mail
Ottawa pressed to split online harms bill to fast-track its passage
Child-safety advocates and technology experts are urging the federal government to swiftly bring back the online harms bill, but to split it in two to speed passage of measures that protect children from abuse. Bill C-63, which died when the last Parliament was prorogued in January, included initiatives to combat online child abuse and hate. But it faced sharp criticism from opposition MPs and civil liberty advocates for also proposing new criminal offences for hate propaganda and hate crimes – including life in prison for inciting genocide. Advocacy group OpenMedia says hundreds of messages have been sent to MPs since the election calling for the government to reintroduce the online harms bill. They want it to focus on measures to improve online safety for children and youth, and to create an independent regulator to tackle predatory behaviour, bullying and abuse online, while protecting online privacy or expression. The bill drew criticism from civil liberties groups for proposing a 'peace bond' to deter people feared to be planning to carry out hate crimes and hate propaganda offences, with penalties such as house arrest. Government ministers have indicated they plan to bring back the online harms bill but have not yet confirmed who would be shepherding it through Parliament. Will Carney's to-do list be hindered by parliamentary tactics? How the next government can protect Canada's information ecosystem Earlier this month, Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon said he expected it would be steered through by Canadian Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault. Among those calling for a swift reintroduction of the bill is Carol Todd, the mother of Amanda Todd, a teenager who died by suicide after falling victim to cyberbullying. She warned that Canada is lagging far behind countries such as the U.S. and Britain, which have already passed laws to protect people in the digital sphere. Ms. Todd said the government should take feedback it received on Bill C-63 before the election, including criticism of increased penalties for hate crimes, and put the Criminal Code measures on a separate track. 'They need to do two bills. If they put the same bill through, the same things will happen again and it will get held up,' she said. Bill C-63 would have forced online platforms to swiftly remove child sexual abuse material, intimate content shared without consent, and posts encouraging a child to self-harm. It would have created a digital safety commission and ombudsperson to combat online hate. 'The previous government's attempt to combine a platform accountability bill with a criminal justice bill was unwise,' said John Matheson, who leads the Canadian arm of Reset Tech, a global non-profit that fights digital threats to democracy, 'The Carney government would miss the mark if they do not create a new public regulator to hold platforms accountable in keeping our kids safe,' he said. The advocacy group OpenMedia wants the government to bring back the bill soon after MPs return from their summer break. 'Canada's next Online Harms Act should be about addressing the worst online harms, and not package in broader measures that aren't about the consequences of digital technologies,' said Matt Hatfield, the group's executive director. He said the controversy over new criminal penalties for hate speech and hate crimes 'completely overshadowed discussion of part one, the real core of the Online Harms Act.' 'There's still critical amendments to make to part one's text to strike the right balance between safety and online privacy and expression, but these changes are at a scale a parliamentary committee given adequate time can accomplish.' Lianna McDonald, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, said it 'would not be opposed to the approach of addressing Criminal Code and human rights amendments through its own bill or bills, and addressing online harms to children in its own bill.' 'It was clear in the last session that there was consensus amongst our elected officials that legislative action to protect children from online harms is urgently needed, so it seems more likely that a bill focused on the protection of children will be able to move forward,' she said. Charlotte Moore Hepburn, medical director of the division of pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, said 'a new bill – one that prioritizes online safety for children and youth – is essential.'
Arab News
13-06-2025
- Business
- Arab News
Hong Kong rights group shuts down after years of advocating for workers
HONG KONG: A Hong Kong group that advocated for workers rights for decades announced its shutdown abruptly on Thursday, citing financial difficulties and debt issues. China Labor Bulletin planned to stop updating its website content and appeared to have deleted Facebook and Instagram social media accounts used by the nonprofit rights organization. 'The company can no longer maintain operations and has decided to dissolve and initiate the relevant procedures,' it said in a statement on an archived web page Friday. Founded in 1994, organization maintained a database tracking workers' strikes, protests, workplace accidents and other labor rights incidents in China. As dozens of civil society groups disbanded or left Hong Kong in the wake of the 2020 Beijing-imposed national security law, China Labor Bulletin continued providing valuable resources for journalists and academics in the southern Chinese city. Critics say the drastic political changes in Hong Kong indicated the decline of Western-style civil liberties that China promised to keep intact when the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. However, Beijing and Hong Kong governments insisted the law was crucial to bring stability to the city following massive anti-government protests in 2019. China Labor Bulletin's founder Han Dongfang, a former railway worker who participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. He told the Central News Agency of Taiwan that the shutdown was his decision and he would stay in Hong Kong. Han's decision appeared sudden to many Hong Kong civil society observers. Three weeks ago, he wrote on social media platform LinkedIn about his work anniversary and his team's progress. 'Let's keep our faith up at this abnormal time and continue our important work,' he said.
National Post
06-06-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Liberal border security bill poses serious threat to rights, coalition warns
OTTAWA — A national coalition of civil society groups says the Liberal government's new border security bill poses a serious risk to liberties and human rights. Article content The Ottawa-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group is calling on the government to withdraw the bill and replace it with more targeted legislation on specific border concerns. Article content Article content The coalition brings together dozens of non-governmental organizations, unions, professional associations, faith groups, environmental groups, human rights and civil liberties advocates and groups representing immigrant and refugee communities. Article content Article content The bill introduced this week would give authorities new powers to search mail, make it easier for officials to pause or cancel immigration applications and expand the Canadian Coast Guard's role to include security activities. Article content Article content The government says the legislation aims to keep borders secure, fight transnational organized crime, stop the flow of deadly fentanyl and crack down on money laundering. Article content The bill comes amid sustained pressure from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, which has cited concerns about the southbound flow of irregular migrants and fentanyl in imposing tariffs on Canadian goods. Article content The new bill swiftly won support from Canada's police chiefs and child protection advocates working to prevent young people from being victimized by online predators. Article content The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group says the federal government is using the bill to seek powers in the areas of immigration and police access to personal information that are not related to securing the border. Article content Article content 'If the government is serious about addressing concerns regarding illegal gun and drug trafficking, it must introduce legislation specifically tailored to that goal, as opposed to a wide-ranging omnibus bill,' said Tim McSorley, the coalition's national co-ordinator. Article content Article content If the government pursues new legislation to replace the bill, it should undertake full consultations with experts in civil liberties, privacy and immigration and refugee rights before introducing it, McSorley added in a statement. Article content The coalition said it's concerned about provisions in the bill that would limit the ability of people to claim asylum in Canada and give Canada Post powers to open and search letter mail. Article content The monitoring group also noted there is no independent oversight body for the Coast Guard, which would be allowed to conduct security patrols and collect intelligence under the terms of the border bill. Article content The coalition says it also has reservations about proposed changes to the Criminal Code and the law governing the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that would make it easier to access information about internet subscribers, and would allow for warrantless police access in urgent circumstances.
