Legal News

Aussie Court Pontiff-icates, Allows Protesters at World Youth Day

By Dan Slater

What with lethargic judges, Sudoku-playing juries and publicly-traded law firms, Australia (who’d have thunk?) has emerged as a law blogger’s wonderland.

Now this: The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that two activists have successfully challenged a law that carries a $5,500 fine for annoying World Youth Day participants.

Rachel Evans and Amber Pike, activists in The NoToPope Coalition, wanted to hand out condoms, candles and stickers containing political slogans during a WYD march through Sydney’s Moore Park. The three-judge panel of Australia’s Federal Court ruled that part of the World Youth Day Act, passed by parliament to keep order during the WYD events, “should not be interpreted as conferring powers that are repugnant to fundamental rights and freedoms at common law in the absence of clear authority from Parliament”.

World Youth Day is, according to its Web site, an event organized by the Catholic Church in which the Pope invites the world’s youth to “celebrate their faith around a particular theme.”

The judges, according to the Herald, ruled that, in their view, none of the items the activists proposed to distribute were proscribed articles within the meaning of the act. Nor were “symbolic coat-hangers” they planned to hand out to draw attention to the backyard abortion problem. Moreover, the interpretation of the clause that allowed regulation of conduct deemed to be a cause of “annoyance”, was invalid, the judges ruled, because it “affects freedom of speech in a way that, in our opinion, is not supported by the statutory powers”. There was “no intelligible boundary” on what “causes annoyance.”

Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said the decision would have no impact on policing of World Youth Day events, and that the police had sufficient powers to ensure the safety of the so-called pilgrims during the celebrations. “We respect the court’s ruling,” Scipione said. “Effectively the court has upheld all the regulations apart from the phrase ’causes annoyance’.”

NoToPope’s Evans said: “We now have a lot more confidence to go to the streets to campaign against the condemnation of condoms, homosexuality and abortion. . . .We can wear our [No to the Pope] T-shirts now and they cannot be deemed to be annoying.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 15, 2008 (boomark / email).