New York is girding for a late summer and fall of unrest and disruption, as anti-Israel college students return to campus and the presidential election looms.
But the protests would have a better chance of staying peaceful — as demonstrators frequently claim to intend — if the city took a lesson from Britain, where prosecutors and judges are applying the law so that illegal actions of demonstrators of all political stripes have real consequences.
Last month, UK judge Christopher Hehir shocked Britain when he handed down a five-year jail sentence to Roger Hallam, a climate activist with the Just Stop Oil movement, and four-year sentences to four of his accomplices.
The convictions came as the result of a 2022 British law criminalizing “conspiracy to commit a public nuisance,” defined as any action that causes “direct harm” to the public.
In this case, Hallam & Co. didn’t take any violent action: Hehir ruled they conspired to “cause a nuisance” by shutting down a major highway, the M25 in southern England, for several days in November 2022.
The conspiracy occurred when the activists organized their blockades via an open-to-the-public Zoom meeting recorded by a journalist. The call recruited dozens of people to participate in the shutdown, which caused gridlock in four counties over four days.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images