Private property & the right to protest: restoring the quasi-public trust in the 21st century

私人财产

• 批准号: 2748347
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Liverpool
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2748347
• 关键词: Private; property; right; protest; restoring

This research scrutinizes the role of English land law and human rights law in restricting the right to protest on 'privately owned public spaces'. The right to protest is fundamental in any democratic, accountable and inclusive society. But many important protests have been restricted in the United Kingdom in recent years, such as the demonstration at Paternoster Square by the Occupy London movement or the 2019 environmental protests at Heathrow Airport by Extinction Rebellion. The private ownership structures of these public spaces have facilitated this, as English land law confers upon private landowners a relatively unqualified right to arbitrarily exclude members of the public at their own discretion. After all, in the famous words of Lord Camden CJ, "our law holds the property of every man so sacred, that no man can set his foot upon his neighbour's close without his leave" (Entick v Carrington (1765) 95 ER 807). In English law, the right to protest on public land is protected in a limited but proportional way by the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998, but the law has struggled to apply this right to private land. This is true of increasingly important privately owned public spaces in the contemporary land-economy, such as shopping centres, airports and university campuses. Instead, these privately owned public spaces are conceived by the law as ordinary examples of fully-private land, even when their functions and characteristics remain overwhelmingly public. Therefore, a modification of the doctrines of trespass and arbitrary exclusion is required so that the law may acknowledge the public interest in privately owned public spaces and thus guarantee the right to protest on these instances of private land. This thesis seeks to achieve this by restoring the legal conceptual framework of the 'quasi-public trust doctrine', a 19th century common law doctrine which acknowledged and upheld a public right of access to private corporate monopolies. Contextualising this to the modern day, English lawyers can pursue amendments to the law so as to protect the fundamental right to protest and guarantee a doctrine of reasonable access to privately owned public spaces.

本研究考察了英国土地法和人权法在限制“私人拥有的公共空间”抗议权利方面的作用。抗议权是任何民主、负责任和包容社会的基本权利。但近年来，英国许多重要的抗议活动都受到了限制，比如占领伦敦运动在帕特诺斯特广场的示威活动，或者2019年灭绝叛乱在希思罗机场的环境抗议活动。这些公共空间的私人所有权结构促进了这一点，因为英国土地法赋予私人土地所有者一种相对不受限制的权利，可以根据自己的判断任意排除公众成员。毕竟，用卡姆登法官的名言来说，“我们的法律认为每个人的财产都是神圣的，没有人可以未经许可擅自踏上邻居的土地”（恩蒂克诉卡灵顿（1765）95 ER 807）。在英国法律中，在公共土地上抗议的权利受到《欧洲人权公约》（European Convention on Human Rights）和《1998年人权法案》（Human Rights Act 1998）的有限保护，但该法律一直难以将这项权利适用于私人土地。在当代土地经济中，越来越重要的私人拥有的公共空间（如购物中心、机场和大学校园）也是如此。相反，这些私人拥有的公共空间被法律视为完全私有土地的普通例子，即使它们的功能和特征仍然是压倒性的公共。因此，需要对非法侵入和任意排除的原则进行修改，以便法律可以承认私人拥有的公共空间中的公共利益，从而保障对这些私人土地的抗议权利。本文试图通过恢复“准公共信托原则”的法律概念框架来实现这一目标，“准公共信托原则”是一种19世纪的普通法原则，它承认并支持公共有权进入私人公司垄断。在现代背景下，英国律师可以寻求修改法律，以保护抗议的基本权利，并保证合理进入私人拥有的公共空间的原则。