Noisy and disruptive protests are, frankly, a nuisance to us all. At the time of writing, the prospect of serious disruption for many rail passengers with the planned June’s rail strikes is bad enough, but at least travellers can plan ahead and take a different route (or drive, if they can afford the fuel).
But try driving through a busy city and finding the road blocked with climate change protesters chained to their vehicles – all in a good cause, of course; but creating not merely a public nuisance but serious disruption.
The new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 strengthens the powers of the police to crack down on these types of activities by preventing protests or imposing conditions on them. In many cases, more robust police powers are necessary. For example, their previous public order powers were (according to the police) insufficient to deal with the high profile and highly disruptive tactics used by Extinction Rebellion back in 2019.
Climate change protesters – many of who seem to have an enviable amount of free time on their hands – are a completely different ball game to Christians who preach in the open air. But the new laws could catch street preachers just as they could catch genuinely disruptive organised protesters.
Let’s look at the wording of the new Act. The police have powers to clamp down on ‘unjustifiably noisy protests that cause harm to others or prevent an organisation from operating’. A ‘protest’ specifically includes a single person protest – which clearly means it can catch Christians preaching on their own in the open air.
The new powers are only to be used if officers reasonably believe noise from the protest may cause serious disruption to or cause a significant impact on people in the vicinity. At first sight, this appears reassuring: a single preacher is hardly likely to be caught by this wording unless they use a loudspeaker. That said, ‘noise’ is not defined and preaching – as any form of speaking – amounts to ‘noise’.
Distress and offence
But let’s move on. The definition of ‘impact’ includes intimidation, harassment, alarm or distress. So it’s really not difficult to see that, for example, individuals from the LGBT community will make a complaint to the police about a street preacher causing distress.
Similarly, anyone hearing the message that they need to repent only has to complain about the distress it is causing and the preacher could be charged with an offence. And the gospel is, by its very nature, offensive.
Significantly, only the mere risk of intimidation, harassment, alarm or distress could be sufficient for an offence to have been committed. Actual distress or alarm is not required.
Ten years for annoyance!
Secondly, a statutory public nuisance offence has also been introduced, carrying a prison sentence of up to ten years in prison. This means that, separately to the police powers around protests, an open-air preacher could be charged if there is a complaint that his conduct causes – or even risks causing -‘serious distress’ or ‘serious annoyance’.
Protests cannot be banned under human rights laws. The government says the Act achieves a better balance between the rights of protesters and the rights of others to go about their daily business free of disruption.
However, the actual wording of the Act paints a different story. Today, anyone hearing a street preacher preaching the gospel in the open air only needs to make a complaint to the police – and this could be enough for the preacher to be stopped and potentially face criminal charges.
Jeremiah Igunnubole, is legal counsel for ADF UK, a faith-based advocacy group. He recently said: ‘It cannot be right that those with controversial viewpoints could now be more at risk of arrest and prosecution based on whether their views comply with the ever-changing standards of the state machinery and society at large.’
While we wait to see how the legislation plays out in practice, Christians must continue praying for open-air preachers as they preach in an increasingly hostile climate.
