Cambridge Symposium on Protest and Peaceful Assembly

Across three panel sessions, we examine the social and political importance of assembly; its status as a legally-protected right at the national and international levels; and the boundaries of its legitimate regulation in practice.

Convened by:

• Professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Drexel University Kline School of Law
• Dr Michael Hamilton, International Secretariat of Amnesty International
• Dr Thomas Probert, Centre for Human Rights (Pretoria)
• Professor Sharath Srinivasan, University of Cambridge

Speakers include:

• Gina Romero, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association
• Professor Greg Magarian, Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law
• Professor David Mead, Professor of UK Human Rights Law, University of East Anglia
• Dr Kirsty Hughes, Associate Professor in Public Law, University of Cambridge
• Dr Orsolya Salat, Associate Professor, ELTE University Budapest
• Professor Pete Fussey, Professor of Criminology, University of Southampton

Lunch will be provided. Registration essential.

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10:00 - Registration and coffee

10:45-11:00 - Opening remarks

11:00-12:30 - Panel 1: The Power and Politics of Assembly

12:30-13:30 - Lunch

13:30-15:00 - Panel 2: Claiming the Right of Peaceful Assembly

15:00-15:`15 - Tea/coffee break

15:15-16:45 - Panel 3: Between Protection and Control: State Interventions and Assembly

16:45-17:00 - Closing

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Panel 1: The Power and Politics of Assembly

Assemblies – ranging from mass urban protests to small private gatherings – constitute a vital mode of social and political engagement. The co-presence of assembly participants has a value that far exceeds mediated and individualized forms of expression. Yet this is a value that is gravely under threat today. This session seeks to foreground ‘assembly’ and to situate such collective formations as modes of counter-power, capable of sustaining activism and reimagining political community – recognizing too that assemblies are also contingent formations that can be instrumentalized in ways that reproduce exclusions, boundaries and territorial claims over space and voice.

Panel 2: Claiming the Right of Peaceful Assembly

The effectiveness of the right of peaceful assembly is ultimately determined by political and juridical interpretations of its scope and permissible limitation. This panel will explore what is to be gained by claiming assembly as a legal right, recognizing how international human rights law and standards have been progressively strengthened and exploring opportunities for both advocacy and litigation around the remaining gaps in protection. In particular, this session will consider the contested faultline between ‘peaceful’ and ‘violent’ conduct – and related thresholds of inconvenience and disruption – so often exploited to narrow the protection afforded to the right to protest.

Panel 3: Between Protection and Control: State Interventions and Assembly

Regulatory interventions commonly rely on modes of management and control that aim to pacify and wear down collection action. Onerous procedural requirements, sweeping restrictions, informal spaces of negotiation, sophisticated infrastructures of surveillance, developments in public order weaponry and expanding criminalization, together operate to inform how law enforcement understand their role in policing assemblies, and to recast protest and assembly in pathological terms of danger and risk. Recognizing that the right of peaceful assembly sits uneasily at the heart of the modern state, this session will interrogate such regulatory practices and ask how the state’s obligations to protect and facilitate peaceful assemblies should be construed.

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Host or Publisher Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)