Anti-war protest placards seized

[align=left]Anti-war protest placards seized
Press Association | May 23 2006
Police have removed placards belonging to anti-war protester Brian Haw at his long-running demonstration outside Parliament.[/align]
Mr Haw said he had been left with just one placard after officers took the action over alleged breaches of his demonstration conditions.
Earlier this month, Court of Appeal judges overturned a ruling that allowed him to carry out his round-the-clock vigil which he began in June 2001.
Mr Haw, who was not evicted from Parliament Square, said his large display of anti-war banners, placards and flags had been "completely destroyed".
He said: "They have left me with just (one) placard. All of my personal belongings have been taken and dumped in a container along with nearly all the displays.
"They have completely destroyed all the expressions of people who opposed the war in Iraq. What gives them the legal right to remove 40m of evidence of genocide and reduce it to just 3m?"
The legal size of the protest - 3m - was imposed by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (Socpa) 2005.
A spokeswoman for Scotland Yard confirmed officers attended the scene at 2.35am.
She said: "The Metropolitan Police Service removed placards from a demonstration site as per conditions related to size and supervision imposed in relation to notice to demonstrate under Socpa.
"This action was taken due to continual breaches of the conditions imposed on the demonstration. This action follows a number of requests to the applicant to adhere to the conditions, which he has failed to comply with."

This was in Scotland?

I usually get a decent response ph..you must have left...and I stopped clicking links on here..not because of yours but because I did click before and I have security on my pc and it caught a virus someone had tried to infect computers from their link...so it put me off links..

Brian William Haw (born 1949) is an unemployed British carpenter who is famous for living in Parliament Square since 2001 in an anti-war protest. Although he had begun before the terror attacks on the United States, Haw has become a symbol of the anti-war protest movement over the policies of both Britain and the United States in Afghanistan and later Iraq.


Background
Haw was the elder of twins by 25 minutes and grew up in Barking and Whitstable. His father, who worked in a betting office, had been one of the first British soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and committed suicide 20 years later. Haw was apprenticed to a boat-builder from the age of 16 and then entered the Merchant Navy as a deckhand. In this job he visited many of the world's trouble-spots. In 1970 he studied for six months at an evangelical Christian college in Nottingham and then went to Belfast to try to mediate between the two sides in the Troubles.

In the early 1970s Haw moved to Essex and started a removals business, also working part-time as a carpenter. He met his wife Kay in the early 1970s; she gave birth to his seven children. The family eventually settled in Redditch, Worcestershire. In 1989 he travelled to Cambodia to try to help that country, and in the 1990s he tried to help disadvantaged children in the local area. However the family found themselves the victim of anti-social behaviour, and Haw's attempt to stop it by presenting a dossier to the Crown Prosecution Service led to it getting worse.

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Parliament Square protests
On June 2, 2001, he began camping in Parliament Square in central London in a one-man political protest against war and foreign policy (initially, the sanctions against Iraq). By his own account, he was first inspired to take up his vigil after seeing the images and information produced by the Mariam Appeal, an anti-sanctions campaign. Haw justifies his campaign on a need to improve his children's future. He only leaves his makeshift campsite in order to attend court hearings, surviving on food brought by supporters. Support for Haw's protest has come from former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn and activist/comedian Mark Thomas.

Westminster City Council attempted to prosecute Haw for causing an obstruction to the pavement in October 2002 but the case failed as Haw's banners did not impede movement. The continuous use of a megaphone by Haw led to objections by Members of Parliament who have offices close to his protest. The House of Commons Procedure Committee held a brief inquiry in summer 2003 which heard evidence that permanent protests in Parliament Square could provide an opportunity for terrorists to disguise explosive devices, and resulted in a recommendation that the law be changed to prohibit them. Although initially reluctant, the Government passed such a provision in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (sections 132 to 138).

In the 2005 general election Haw stood as a candidate in the Cities of London and Westminster in order to further his campaign and oppose the Act which was yet to come in to force. He won 298 votes (0.8 percent), making a speech against the ongoing presence of UK troops in Iraq at the declaration of the result.

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Legal action
As preparation for implementing the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act began, Haw won an application for judicial review on July 28, 2005, successfully arguing that a technical defect in the Act meant it did not apply in his case. The Act states that demonstrations must have authorisation from the police "when the demonstration starts", and Haw asserted that his demonstration had begun before the passage of the Act, which was not made retroactive. Although the commencement order made to bring the Act into force had made reference to demonstrations begun before the Act came into force, there was no power for the commencement order to extend the scope of the Act.

The Government appealed against the judgment, and on May 8, 2006 the Court of Appeal allowed the appeal and therefore declared that the Act did apply to him. The Court found that the intent of Parliament was clearly to apply to all demonstrations in Parliament Square regardless of when they had begun:

23. The only sensible conclusion to reach in these circumstances is that Parliament intended that those sections of the Act should apply to a demonstration in the designated area, whether it started before or after they came into force. Any other conclusion would be wholly irrational and could fairly be described as manifestly absurd. [1]
In the meantime Haw had applied for permission to continue his demonstration, and received it on condition that his display of placards is no more than 3m wide (among other things). Haw was unwilling to comply and the Police have referred his case to the Crown Prosecution Service; a number of supporters have begun to camp with him in order to deter attempts to evict him.

In the early hours of Tuesday, 23 May 2006, Police removed all but one of Brian Haw's placards citing continual breached conditions of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 as their reason for doing so [2][3].


i wonder if he has an axe to grind.....

Near the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, British forces established a displaced persons (DP) camp for refugees after World War II. The site used abandoned German army Panzer barracks for housing facilities, and after November of 1945, Jewish refugees were given their own section. The camp was the largest DP camp in Germany with 11,000 residents in 1946 and the only exclusively Jewish facility in the British sector.

The British authorities tried to rename the camp Hohne to avoid the association with Nazi genocide at the concentration camp nearby, but the Holocaust survivors who were residents (Sh'erit ha-Pletah) in the camp refused to accept the name change and persisted in calling the DP camp Bergen-Belsen.

The leader of the camp, Josef Rosensaft organized the first Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the camp, an organization that grew to be the main organization of its kind in Europe.

The refugees maintained active opposition to British restrictions on Jewish immigration to the British Mandate of Palestine, and until 1949 (well after the establishment of the State of Israel), British authorities did not allow free passage in and out of the camp. In 1946, administrative responsibility for the camp passed to the UNRRA, though British occuping forces maintained security around the camp. Nevertheless, the Haganah established secret training programs on camp grounds in December of 1947.

For their part, the refugees organized a vibrant community within the camp. Schools were established within months of the liberation, and at one point there were 20 weddings every day in the camp. A newspaper known as Unzer Stimme (Yiddish for "Our Voice" was published by the camp and was the main Jewish newspaper in the British sector.

By 1951, the camp was vacated, the majority of refugees having immigrated to the State of Israel


i wonder if he has a slanted view from his father?

Thank You Bong for taking the time to post that information..and I would say his view would be very slanted..mine would if I had the history his family did. I understand now..but since 2001? They were accomadating and he stopped complying with the rules..just my opinion.