Judicial opportunities and the death of SHAC: legal repression along a cycle of contention

Abstract

Focusing on the British animal rights campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences, this article investigates how changing judicial opportunities effectively cause the demobilization of a social movement campaign, explaining the central role of law and criminal justice in movement repression. The study identifies four forms of legal repression arising in response to the UK organization Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty: elite-initiated protest control, targeted criminalization, leadership decapitation and extended incapacitation. The analysis demonstrates the need to widen repression research beyond the policing of protest events, to cover how social movement activists are controlled after arrest. It concludes by arguing for the inclusion of a stage-dimension in repression research to better grasp the crucial role of private elites in the initiation of repression. The study builds on qualitative data from Britain, obtained by participant observation, trial observation and interviews, covering both protestors and their adversaries.

• Keywords
• Repression
• protest policing
• animal rights
• judicial opportunities
• political opportunities
• cycle of contention

Notes

1. The article refers to criminal justice as a process, rather than a consistent system, because criminal justice agencies do not necessarily share the same ambitions, may pull in different directions, and sometimes even work against each other (Padfield & Bild, 2016, p. 7).

2. Europol’s (2011, p. 3) Animal Rights Extremism: Quarterly Bulletin states: ‘The increase in Animal Rights Extremism (ARE) incidents in Europe in the last 5 years has forced EU MS [member states] to take this type of criminality into consideration. During the Conference on ARE held in Stockholm, Sweden (14–16 May 2007), participating EU countries […] agreed that there is an urgent need to monitor ARE related incidents across Europe.’

3. ‘Elite’ refers to a collective actor who is superior in terms of ability or quality to the rest of society, particularly because they can affect state policies on what they experience, perceive or label as ‘threats.’

4. Three of the interviewees were interviewed twice, so these are counted as six interviews.

5. Forenames without reference to external sources are pseudonyms used for the author’s interviewees.

6. For examples of injunctions issued against other movements, see Thornton et al. (2010, pp. 391–392) and CCPL (2013).

7. Section 149 of SOCPA open to extension into other protest areas.

8. ASBOs are given either as an ‘ASBO on conviction’ (as described in this article), under section 1C of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (CDA), or as a ‘stand-alone ASBO’ during civil proceedings under section 1 of the CDA. In addition to the ASBOs (on conviction) handed down to SHAC organizers, activists who participated in SHAC protests also received stand-alone ASBOs.

9. There is no legal definition of domestic extremism in the UK. However, the Metropolitan Police Service (2014) recently laid out a new working definition of the term: ‘domestic extremism relates to the activity of groups or individuals who commit or plan serious criminal activity motivated by a political or ideological viewpoint.’