The Article 11 Trust responds to the launch of “The Right to Monitor Assemblies in the OSCE Region: Experiences from the Field” published today.
A report launched today in Warsaw by an intergovernmental body, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), sets out the challenges experienced by monitoring groups across Europe attempting to document violations of the right to freedom of assembly.
“The Right to Monitor Assemblies in the OSCE Region: Experiences from the Field” makes a series of recommendations to OSCE member states, including the United Kingdom government, that include better recognition of the work of independent legal observers and measures ensuring that “assembly monitors can operate… free of any form of harassment, threats (including threat of arrest) and intimidation, including based on their gender or perceived sexual orientation”.
The OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which compiled the report, interviewed our partner organisation Netpol and heard that “misogynistic comments [by police officers] have been reported as targeting women observers in particular”.
This is backed up by the Article 11 Trust’s own research, “Protecting Protest” published in May 2022 on the treatment of legal observers and acknowledged by ODIHR researchers: “A significant majority of legal observers reported experiencing harassment and intimidation by the police. and 56 per cent of monitors surveyed in the UK reported having experienced gender-based discrimination by the police, from being patronized to sexually harassed or assaulted.”
The ODIHR report notes our finding that threats of arrest of commonplace, with “75 per cent of the legal observers surveyed identified the implicit or explicit threat of arrest as routine”. It also highlights how in Britain, “pushing and shoving monitors appears to be quite common, while more severe incidents of police use of force are reported as unusual”.
Netpol has documented several cases of use of force against legal observers in 2024 and the ODIHR report highlights how “in one case, two identifiable legal observers were reportedly injured as a result of police use of force during a demonstration. They were both apparently struck with police batons. In another case, a legal observer, also identifiable by her vest, was reportedly knocked over by running police officers, leaving her injured and unconscious on the ground.”
Current police operational guidance in Britain issued by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council says “a ‘legal observer’ is not a term that has, or indicates, any specific status…. Legal observers are not automatically entitled to be treated differently to any other person”.
The Article 11 Trust supports the call on the British government to properly recognise the status of legal observers in a way that “protects their rights to carry out assembly monitoring unimpeded and provides for the obligation on state bodies to facilitate their activities”.
The Trust agrees with the ODIHR assessment that it is unacceptable to make this conditional upon “any state-granted ‘accreditation’ or similar status, and that [legal observers] are afforded [recognition] irrespective of whether an assembly has complied with the requisite notification or other legal requirements, or whether it is peaceful or not”.
“The Right to Monitor Assemblies in the OSCE Region: Experiences from the Field” was launched at the OSCE’s Warsaw Human Dimension Conference on 7 October and is available to download here.