Is It ‘Harassment’ To Heckle Your Local Politician? A British Court Thinks So.
A court in Cardiff convicted two Welsh protesters on Tuesday of “harassment” for causing “alarm and distress” to Alex Davies-Jones, the member of Parliament for Pontypridd and the undersecretary of state for victims.
Local citizens Ayeshah Behit and Hiba Ahmed had been out pamphleting against the war in Gaza last June when they ran into Davies-Jones on the street. They asked Davies-Jones why she abstained on a ceasefire vote—she says she was out of the country during the vote—and Behit posted a short Instagram video of the interaction, calling Davies-Jones a liar.
“It was escalating in terms of passion and intensity. We walked off in the opposite direction. We felt scared and intimidated, and we wanted to leave the situation,” Davies-Jones told the court, adding that Behit and Ahmed were “shouting and bellowing down the street.”
Just two hours after the video was posted, “over a dozen police officers swarmed my door and windows, with several male officers trying to climb in through open windows,” Behit told the Network for Police Monitoring, a British civil libertarian nonprofit. She was let out on bail, with the condition that she refrain from posting about Davies-Jones or the case on social media.
At Tuesday’s trial, Judge
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