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

这项研究仔细研究了英国土地法和人权法在限制私人拥有的公共空间上抗议的权利方面所起的作用。在任何民主、负责和包容的社会，抗议的权利都是基本的。但近年来，英国的许多重要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，或者灭绝反抗运动2019年在希思罗机场举行的环境抗议活动。这些公共空间的私有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不受限制的权利，可以自行决定任意排除公众成员。毕竟，用卡姆登勋爵(Lord Camden CJ)的名言来说，“我们的法律对每个人的财产都是神圣的，没有他的许可，任何人都不能踏上他邻居的近处”(Entick诉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，但法律一直难以将这一权利应用于私人土地。在当代土地经济中，私人拥有的公共空间越来越重要，如购物中心、机场和大学校园，就是如此。相反，法律将这些私人所有的公共空间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空间。因此，有必要修改非法侵入和任意排斥的理论，以便法律能够承认私人拥有的公共空间的公共利益，从而保障在这些私人土地上抗议的权利。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点，准公共信托原则是19世纪的一项普通法原则，承认并维护公共获得私人公司垄断的权利。结合现代背景，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。

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.