BYM lobbies on Public Order Bill
Bill’s proposals as ‘a serious threat to civil liberties in the UK'
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has briefed key parliamentarians on the Public Order Bill, which is currently going through parliament.
Grace Da Costa, public affairs and media manager for BYM, told the Friend that lobbying had taken place ahead of the report stage, which is the last main stage in the House of Commons before it goes to the House of Lords.
She described some of the bill’s proposals as ‘a serious threat to civil liberties in the UK’ and bringing back ‘all the bits of the Policing Act that got thrown out in the House of Lords’.
These provisions include Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPOs, or ‘protest banning orders’); expansion of stop and search; and new offences of locking on and being equipped for locking on. There are also new offences of tunnelling and being in a tunnel.
Grace Da Costa said: ‘Protest banning orders could be used to monitor people as they go about their daily lives and severely restrict people’s freedom without them even having been convicted of a crime.’
BYM has also highlighted the Bill of Rights Bill, also known as the ‘Rights Removal Bill’, as another threat to civil liberties. According to Grace Da Costa, the bill has been ‘laid in parliament but hasn’t begun its passage in earnest yet. It aims to scrap the Human Rights Act, which enshrines the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. It will make it hard for people whose human rights have been violated by public bodies to access justice’.
BYM will continue to monitor these bills as they go through parliament and provide some targeted lobbying. However, BYM’s focus will be on ‘the bigger picture of protecting and promoting democracy, with an emphasis on truth and integrity in public life’.
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