Met police accused of ‘assault on right to protest’ after tenfold rise in nuisance law arrests | Metropolitan police

London police have been accused of having abused their powers to slow down protest after research has revealed that less than 3% of the arrests for conspiracy to cause public nuisance in the past five years have led to prosecution.

Research has also revealed an increase of almost ten times in the number of arrests in the capital for the offense, most often used to target activists, since 2019, when the extinction rebellion has triggered a wave of climate activism.

The activists said that the conclusions showed that the police abused the law to arrest protests with a power that enabled them to intimidate the demonstrators by placing them in police custody, impose surety conditions and collect their DNA imprints and their fingerprints.

But the police said that they had a duty to intervene “when the protest crossed the line in crime” and the difference in the evidence between the arrest and the accusation explained the gap found in the research.

Areeba Hamid, a co-executive co-executor of Greenpeace UK, who has done the research, said: “The police regularly lead to street demonstrators for a crime, they almost still not charge them to amount to abuse of their powers and an assault against the right to demonstrate.

“Stopping people respectful of laws because they are politically annoying is a scary development in any democracy and is a direct result of government instinct to close freedom of expression and prevent people from defending the problems that are deeply careful.”

In general, conspiracy offense to provoke a public nuisance involves a group of people who agree to participate in an act which, whether or not, could cause serious damages, disturbances or obstructions to the public.

Since 2022, when the offense has been placed on a statutory basis, it has brought a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. This is one of the most serious protest offenses and was used last year to condemn four oil activists who were imprisoned up to five years – the longest conviction ever sentenced to non -violent protest.

Greenpeace used freedoms of information to find out how many people have been arrested for suspicion of having committed the offense each year between 2012 and March 2025. They found that between 2012 and 2018, 67 arrests were made, including eight or 12% – led to charges.

In 2019, the year of the extinction rebellion and Friday for the future brought hundreds of thousands of people on the streets to protest against the breakdown of the climate, there was an increase in the use of power, with only 205 arrests this year. Since then, until March 2025, there was a total of 638 arrests under power, including 18 to 2.8% – has made people go to court.

Raj Chada, partner of the law firm Hodge Jones & Allen, who is one of the main lawyers for the defense of the United Kingdom’s defense, said that he was not surprised by the figures. “There was massive growth in arrests for public nuisance in the last days of XR … which were previously arrested for obstructing the highway, and the vast majority of these cases have never been nowhere.”

Chada said that the offense, which only existed under Common Law, had given powers to the police to arrest and hold demonstrators as well as to take DNA, fingerprints and photos – powers that they did not have under more minor public offenses.

“It was a means of police control for demonstrations, because you could easily put the surety conditions on people to prevent them from coming to center of London, you could potentially put people in detention,” he said.

“You put them on bond for several months, wait until the XR action is completed, then the reaction without the action or the accusations of a more minor offense such as the obstruction of the highway.”

After an lull in the protest activity during the cocovated pandemic, the arrests for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance increased again in 2021 with the Isope Britain campaign.

Greenpeace data showed that in 2021, the metropolitan police carried out 272 arrests under the power, because the demonstrators disrupted traffic on the roads leading to the orbital highway in the capital, the M25. No accusation was made that year.

The following year, as part of a broader legislative repression against protests, the offense was placed on a statutory basis by the police, the crime Sentencing and Tourts Act 2022, a change which, according to Chada, facilitated prosecutors to more easily bring charges.

However, with the exception of 12 cases the year when the law was adopted, in particular Roger Hallam and his colleagues, the oil activists condemned serious penalties last year for their plot to block the M25, no one has been charged under the legislation since.

Tim Crosland, Director of Plan B, a charity of environmental dispute, which campaigns in the name of demonstrators confronted with prosecution, “said:” Greenpeace research confirms what we have attended directly in recent years. Part of the … repression of civil society is the deliberate inflation of the reasons of arrest.

“It is both an intimidation tactic in itself and also unlocks the powers of search and seizure under the police and criminal Evidence Act, allowing the police to seize the phones and laptops and to carry out dawn raids on those who exercise their democratic rights.”

The MET police said: “The arrest threshold is a reasonable suspicion that an offense has occurred. The threshold to invoice someone is much higher, the officers who need to show that there is enough evidence to provide a realistic perspective of conviction to the Court.