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Human Rights

One would hope not. The point is that the Court struck down section 44 on its face— not as it was applied, not given the circumstances of the case and how it was operated, but on its face. That seems to be a very clear judgment, and I would be fascinated—perhaps horrified—to learn of the Government's reasons for appealing against that judgment. I will finish with a couple of other matters. The hon. Member for Hendon was right to draw attention to the potential for the use of civil injunctions in preventing protest. It appears that around the time of the Kingsnorth protest the Kent police encouraged the power companies concerned to use civil injunctions as a way of preventing that protest from going ahead or being effective. The Government's response seems to be entirely inadequate. As the hon. Gentleman says, special procedures are already in place for certain sorts of circumstances where injunctions are applied for without notice, or only on one side. It would be entirely practical to extend that procedure as the most minimal of safeguards against prior restraint of demonstrations and free speech, to any circumstance in which article 10 or article 11 rights are engaged. This is not about disagreeing with the Government—I simply cannot understand their objections to doing that. My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) mentioned section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. I agree with him. The present offence under section 5 is one of negligence. One could be found guilty of a crime for insulting someone in circumstances where it is likely that someone would be distressed. There are various defences, but that is basically the offence. My hon. Friend, and the Committee, do not suggest that the rather more serious offence in section 4A of intentionally causing that distress should be changed, but section 5 seems to be an example of an overly broad criminal offence that should be reviewed. As my hon. Friend says, one important aspect is the fundamental idea about whether we have a right not to be offended. I do not think that we have such a right. People take offence at all sorts of things, often in political arguments. If free speech is about anything, it is about the right to make political points that other people find offensive. Finally, I want to refer to what the report says about the forward intelligence teams that the police use at demonstrations, especially when they photograph demonstrators. I have been photographed on demonstrations several times. One demonstration was on the middle east, and the other was about student fees in Cambridge. That was such a quiet and civilised demonstration that it did not even leave the pavement. People walked quietly from the Guildhall in Cambridge to one of the open spaces where, on the other side of the road, police officers with long lenses were photographing us all as if we were some kind of public menace. Perhaps we were a public menace, but we were not doing anything at the time to suggest that. When challenged, the police said, "Well, it was possible that you might be committing a criminal offence". We could not work out what the criminal offence was, but all of us on that demonstration were immediately suspects, simply because we disagreed with a Government policy. That is the basis of the Wood case and it is why that case went against the Government. That sort of activity is designed to intimidate and to undermine people's desire to protest. If we cannot sort out that issue and the underlying attitude of the authorities that assumes that there is something wrong with people just because they are protesters, we will never be in a position to say that we fully accept and respect the right to protest.