HRW warns right to protest 'under attack' in UK

LONDON

Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned Thursday that the U.K. has "severely restricted the right to protest" in recent years and was expanding "repressive measures" against peaceful demonstrators.

A report titled "'Silencing the Streets': The Right to Protest Under Attack in the UK," comes a few weeks after Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was arrested and then released at a London protest in support of the Palestine Action group, banned under U.K. anti-terror laws.

"The U.K. is now adopting protest-control tactics imposed in countries where democratic safeguards are collapsing," HRW researcher Lydia Gall said.

"The Labour government has taken a deeply alarming direction on protest rights and appears to be determined to suppress these rights further," the rights organization said in a press release.

According to the HRW research from 2024 and 2025, protesters were "increasingly detained, charged and in some cases sentenced" to multi-year jail terms for non-violent actions including for attending meetings to plan action.

The previous Conservative government brought in sweeping changes to protest laws in 2023 to prevent "disruptive" tactics often used by climate protesters, such as slow walking on roads disrupting traffic or attaching themselves to objects and buildings.

Some of these actions, the HRW report says, would in the past only have resulted in fines or suspended sentences.