Criminal Justice and Public Order Act

UK act of Parliament of November 1994, which created a broad range of new offences and made substantial changes to existing laws in an attempt to tackle those areas where the law was felt to be failing. The act caused considerable controversy, with civil liberties and legal reform groups protesting against the act's restrictions on a suspect's ‘right to silence’. Many young people also viewed the restrictions on protests and unlicensed ‘rave’ parties as an attack on their freedom.

The act was proposed by Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard as a way of ‘getting tough’ with criminals, but was controversial from the start because of its perceived attacks on civil liberties. The act also attracted criticism for being too wide-ranging: it contains over 100 separate sections, dealing with a huge scope of matters from lowering the age of homosexual consent (lowered to 18 in 1994), to powers enabling the setting-up of a DNA database of offenders.

Some of the main provisions are:

Right to silence The law previously allowed a suspect to remain silent when interviewed by the police and not give evidence at trial. The act retained this right but allowed a jury or magistrates to draw adverse inferences from a suspect's refusal to provide an explanation for prosecution evidence.

Trespass The act created a new offence of aggravated trespass, when a trespasser interferes with a lawful activity taking place on private land, primarily aimed at protests against foxhunts and road schemes. Trespassory assemblies, large gatherings on private land without the owner's consent, were also prohibited and the police given new powers to prevent people from going to such assemblies. This power, together with new powers to seize sound equipment belonging to the organizers of unlicensed parties in the open air, were aimed at ‘rave’ parties. The police and local councils were also given new powers to deal with travellers moving vehicles onto land and living there.

Young offenders A new type of ‘youth detention’, a combination of a custody order and a probation order was created. The measure was designed to deal with persistent offenders between the ages of 12 and 15 after public outrage at a series of highly-publicized cases in which the courts were unable to act against juvenile criminals who had committed dozens of offences.

Sexual offences Male rape was recognized by the act for the first time in British law. Previously, offenders had been charged with assault or buggery and it had been argued that not recognizing the offence implied that men who had been raped did not suffer in the same way as female victims. The increasing use of new technology in creating and distributing pornography was also recognized with the creation of a new offence of making or owning computer-generated child pornography. Existing legislation had only covered books, photographs, and videos, allowing child pornographers a loophole which was widely exploited.