The U.K. has sharply curtailed the right to protest in recent years and is expanding what it calls repressive measures against peaceful demonstrators, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned Thursday.
A report titled "'Silencing the Streets': The Right to Protest Under Attack in the UK," comes a few weeks after Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was arrested and then released at a London protest in support of the Palestine Action group, banned under U.K. anti-terror laws.
"The U.K. is now adopting protest-control tactics imposed in countries where democratic safeguards are collapsing," HRW researcher Lydia Gall said.
"The Labour government has taken a deeply alarming direction on protest rights and appears to be determined to suppress these rights further," the rights organization said in a press release.
According to the HRW research from 2024 and 2025, protesters were "increasingly detained, charged and in some cases sentenced" to multi-year jail terms for non-violent actions, including for attending meetings to plan action.
