The Blanket Ban Sixty Metres from the Court

Framework. Assembly is protected by the Constitution, and the Constitution itself forbids a licensing system: assemblies may not be made conditional on permission, only on notification, and they may be restricted by statute only where necessary for public order and the rights of others. Any restriction must satisfy the general limitation clause: statutory basis, legitimate purpose, and proportionality, meaning the means must be appropriate, must be the least restrictive available, and the harm to the right must not outweigh the public interest. The essence of the right must be preserved.

Application. The purposes pleaded, traffic flow, avoiding clashes, and protecting a court, are legitimate. The defect is in the means.

• Traffic: an eight-lane road can ordinarily be managed by lane closure, marshals, or a route adjustment. A stationary 800-person gathering for three hours does not by itself justify total prohibition.
• Counter-demonstration: the risk of confrontation is a reason to separate the two groups, to impose distance and time limits, and to deploy sufficient police, not a reason to silence one side. Suppressing both gatherings because they disagree is the paradigm of the wrong remedy.
• Court security: a 60-metre distance can be managed by a buffer zone, barriers and screening. There is no finding of a specific, direct threat to the Court's functioning.

The complete absence of any considered alternative is decisive against the notice: a blanket ban where lesser measures were available fails the least-restrictive-means test. The prohibition as drafted is very likely unconstitutional.

Timing. The notice was issued at 18:00 on 10 March for an event on 12 March, and served by fax at 19:40 the same evening. Twenty-four hours is not a realistic period in which to seek a court order, and the compression of time is itself a burden on the right, because the practical effect of a late prohibition is often the same as a permanent one. The state is expected to process notifications promptly and to decide early enough that an effective challenge is possible; a deliberately late decision undermines the remedy.

Hearing. There is no general right to an oral hearing before every policing measure, but where a measure extinguishes a fundamental right outright and rests on a discretionary assessment of risk, the organiser must at least have the chance to present alternatives, propose marshals, accept conditions, or answer the security assessment. Deciding on the file alone, with no dialogue, deprives the decision of the very information that would have made a narrower measure possible. That is a procedural defect and it also reinforces the proportionality failure: the authority never tested whether a lesser restriction would work.

Practical route. Seek a stay of execution together with the annulment action, and ask that the stay be decided before 12 March; this is the only route that can clear the way for the assembly itself. In parallel, write to the station offering concrete conditions, marshals, a revised start time and a buffer from the Court, so that the refusal of every alternative is on the record. Do not simply proceed and litigate later: the point will then be argued in a criminal court rather than before the assembly takes place.

Administrative litigation. A prohibition notice is a measure that directly restricts a right and is therefore subject to annulment; the proper defendant is the chief of the police station that issued it. Because annulment alone would come too late, the organiser must apply for suspension of execution at the same time, showing urgency and irreparable harm; loss of the single occasion on which the right can be exercised is usually accepted as irreparable.

Constitutional complaint. A complaint against an exercise of public power is available in principle, but only after the other remedies have been exhausted, and the exhaustion rule bites hardest where a swift statutory remedy exists. In practice the constitutional route is a supplement, not a substitute; its main value is the parallel request for a provisional measure that preserves the position until the ruling.

The risk of proceeding anyway. Holding an assembly after a prohibition exposes the organiser and participants to criminal liability and to claims for policing costs, and the unlawfulness of a ban is not automatically a defence that can be asserted at the scene. Courts have accepted that a manifestly unlawful and void prohibition cannot support a conviction, but that argument is litigated months later, after arrest and prosecution. The safer course is to secure a stay or a provisional measure first, and to hold the assembly with marshals and a documented record of compliance with any conditions.

Also check: whether the counter-demonstrators were banned on the same terms. Unequal treatment of two comparable notifications is a separate and powerful ground of challenge.