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

本研究检视英国土地法与人权法在限制“私人拥有的公共空间”抗议权的角色。抗议权是任何民主、负责任和包容性社会的基本权利。但近年来许多重要的抗议活动在英国都受到了限制，比如“占领伦敦”运动在帕特诺斯特广场的示威活动，或者“灭绝叛乱”组织2019年在希思罗机场举行的环保抗议活动。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相对无限制的权利，可以自行决定任意排除公众成员。毕竟，正如首席法官卡姆登勋爵（Lord Camden CJ）的名言所说：“我们的法律认为每个人的财产都是神圣的，没有人可以在没有他的许可的情况下踏上邻居的土地”（Entick v Carrington（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》和1998年《人权法》的有限但相称的保护，但法律一直在努力将这一权利适用于私人土地。在当代土地经济中，私人拥有的公共空间，如购物中心、机场和大学校园，越来越重要。相反，这些私人拥有的公共空间被法律视为完全私人土地的普通例子，即使它们的功能和特征仍然是压倒性的公共。因此，需要修改非法侵入和任意排除的理论，以便法律可以承认私人拥有的公共空间的公共利益，从而保障对这些私人土地的抗议权。本文试图通过恢复“准公共信托理论”的法律的概念框架来实现这一点，准公共信托理论是19世纪世纪的普通法理论，它承认并支持公众进入私人公司垄断的权利。英国律师可以将这一点置于现代的背景下，对法律进行修订，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。

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.