Reclaim These Streets (RTS) proposed a rally at Clapham Common to mark the death of a 33-year-old marketing executive who was assassinated by a current Met Officer. The group was forced to cancel the official event because police said it would be illegal to hold it under restrictions. The Met told RTS that they would face fines of .000 10,000 each along with possible prosecution if it went ahead. However, hundreds of people attended an informal vigil led by the immediate action team Sisters Uncut. This led to clashes between officers and protesters and accusations of harsh policing. RTS co-founders Jessica Leigh, Anna Birley, Henna Shah and Jamie Klingler have argued that decisions made by the Met before the scheduled vigil amounted to a violation of their human rights to freedom of speech and assembly. In a Supreme Court ruling in March, their claim was upheld by Lord Justice Warby and Justice Justice Holgate, who found that the Met’s rulings before the event “were not in accordance with the law”. After examining a written request from the Met to challenge the decision in the Court of Appeal, the judges refused permission. They said in a court decision: “There were real issues in this case which we resolved with reference to established principles. “It can not be disputed that we were wrong in the first place and we see no other reason to believe that the appellate court would be ready to adopt a different analysis of the facts.” The judges also said that some of the Met’s proposed grounds for appeal were “desperate attempts to challenge reasoned factual conclusions”, while others included “misreading a passage of the judgment, ignoring the overall context”. The Met could go ahead and ask the appellate court for permission. In a summary of the decision last month, Lord Justice Warby said: “The relevant decisions of the [Met] They were to make statements at meetings, in letters and in a press release, in the sense that the Covid-19 regulations in force at the time meant that the vigil would be illegal. These statements interfered with the plaintiffs’ rights because each had a “creepy effect” and contributed at least to some causal contribution to the decision to cancel the vigil. “None of [Met’s] the decisions were in accordance with the law; the evidence showed that the [Met] has failed to fulfill its legal duty to consider whether the plaintiffs could have a reasonable justification for conducting the concentration or conducting the proportionality assessment required for specific events in order to perform that task. “ Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens, 49, was sentenced to life in prison, from which he will never be released, in Old Bailey in September after admitting to the murder. The on-duty policing drew criticism from across the political spectrum, as footage emerged of police forcibly holding women to the ground and handcuffing them. A report by Her Majesty the Inspector of Police and Fire Services and Rescue concluded that Met had “acted appropriately” when dealing with the incident.
