The Weekly Round Up: EHRC Palestine protest concerns, live facial recognition, Peruvian war crimes amnesty, Wikipedia and the Online Safety Act
18 August 2025
In UK news
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has written to the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, urging ‘proportionate policing and protection of protest rights’ in the ongoing controversy over the Government’s proscription of the direct-action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. In her letter of 15 August, EHRC chairwoman Baroness Kishwer Falkner raised concerns over recent ‘reports of police engagement in forms of protest that are not linked to any proscribed organisation’, ‘heavy handed policing’, and ‘blanket approaches [which] risk creating a chilling effect, deterring citizens from exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and assembly through fear of possible consequences.’ Baroness Falkner stressed that any ‘restrictions on the exercise of… fundamental freedoms’ imposed by the police must be subject to an ‘established’ three-stage proportionality test, and that ‘all police officers should receive clear and consistent guidance on their human rights obligations in relation to protest.’ On the same day as the EHRC’s intervention, it was reported that Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, Global Witness and the Quakers had written to the Attorney General, urging him to suspend the prosecution of protestors detained under the Terrorist Act until the judicial review of the Government’s ban on Palestine Action (due to be heard in November). Over 700 protestors have been arrested under the Terrorist Act since its amendment last month.
Human rights advocates have meanwhile sharply criticised and questioned the legality of the expanding use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology by UK police. The Home Office announced this week that 10 new vans equipped with LFR cameras – designed to scan the faces of members of the public and identify them against databases of wanted persons – will be distributed among the Bedfordshire, Greater Manchester, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and West Yorkshire police forces. This roughly doubles the number of such vehicles currently in operation and greatly expands their geographical range, with LFR hitherto confined mostly to London, Essex and South Wales. Labour peer and former Liberty director Baroness Shami Chakrabarti has called the current implementation of the technology ‘incredibly intrusive’ and ‘completely outside the law’, while Big Brother Watch – which is already launching a legal challenge to the use of LFR by the Metropolitan Police – has claimed that the ‘police have interpreted the absence of any legislative basis authorising the use of this intrusive technology as carte blanche to roll it out unfettered’. Serious concerns have been voiced about the increasing use of AI-enhanced LFR surveillance by states worldwide; its use in public spaces has now been been banned by the European Union. The Tony Blair Institute think tank has, by contrast, praised the UK’s adoption of LFR as a ‘no brainer’.
In international news
Peru has brought into law a bill granting a blanket legal amnesty to perpetrators of serious human rights offences committed during the country’s internal armed conflict of 1980-2000. The law, signed by President Dina Boluarte on 13 August, grants impunity to members of the police, armed forces, and ‘self-defence committees’ who are currently under investigation for, or already accused of, crimes committed during the twenty-year conflict, and orders the release of all those already sentenced over the age of 70. Around 70,000 people are reported to have been killed during the conflict, with a further 20,000 or more having ‘disappeared’. The human rights violations, which amount to war crimes, include extrajudicial killings, torture and sexual violence. So far, there have been 150 convictions, with a further 600 pending. As a signatory to the American Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Peru is obliged under international law to investigate and prosecute human rights violations. Human Rights Watch have called the law ‘a betrayal of Peruvian victims… [which] undermines decades of efforts to ensure accountability for atrocities and weakens the country’s rule of law even further.’ Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has condemned the move as a ‘backward step in the pursuit of justice and reconciliation in Peru [which] must be immediately reversed.’
In the courts
The High Court has held that the possibility that Ofcom may, in the near future – in accordance with regulations made by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology – impose extensive restrictions on Wikipedia as a ‘Category 1’ service under the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) is insufficient for the website to be granted permission to bring judicial review on human rights grounds. However, should that categorisation later in fact take place, ‘and if the practical effect is that Wikipedia cannot continue to operate’, then the Secretary of State would ‘have to act compatibly with the Convention’, and his failure to do so could be subject to a future challenge on human rights grounds.
In Wikimedia Foundation & BLN v Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology [2025] EWHC 2086 (Admin), Mr Justice Johnson heard submissions from the claimants (Wikipedia’s service provider Wikimedia, and one of the website’s moderators) concerning the detrimental effect Ofcom’s potential ranking of Wikipedia as a ’Category 1’ platform (subjecting it to the same rules as commercial social media giants such as Facebook, X, TikTok etc.) could have on the resource under OSA. These might include a drastic reduction of visitors (perhaps by as much as 75%), and the potentially dangerous deanonymisation of its editors and moderators. Although Mr Justice Johnson granted the claimants permission for judicial review on the grounds of (1) the Secretary of State’s failure to comply with a duty imposed by OSA ‘to take into account the likely impact of the number of users… of a service’ when making the current regulations, and (2) the irrationality of the Secretary of State’s decisions, judicial review was not permitted on the grounds (3, 4) that the regulations made by the Secretary of State violated Articles 8, 10, 11 and 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights (right to privacy; freedom of expression and association; freedom from discrimination).
Referring to the recent European Court of Human Rights decision in Klimaseniorinnen Schweiz v Switzerland (2024) 79 EHRR, Mr Justice Johnson cited the remarks of the Strasbourg Grand Chamber that “the Court cannot examine a [human rights] violation other than a posteriori, once that violation has occurred. It is only in highly exceptional circumstances that an applicant may nevertheless claim to be a victim of a violation of the Convention owing to a risk of future violation” ([465]-[470]). In the instant case, the Secretary of State’s violation was not a posteriori, since only the regulations to OSA which might later cause Ofcom to rank Wikipedia as a ‘Category 1’ platform were in effect: the categorisation itself had not taken place, and so there was at present merely a risk of future violation. The claimants’ case did not qualify as one with “highly exceptional circumstances”, and so judicial review on the grounds of a merely anticipated human rights violation was not permitted. Nevertheless, a possible future challenge on these same human rights grounds, if the categorisation were made, ‘would not be prevented by the outcome of this claim.’
