Legal Scholars Debate Right to Peaceful Assembly

Five Harvard Law School affiliates could not reach a consensus about whether the right to peaceful assembly is in fact an inviolable human right during an event at the Law School on Wednesday.

During the panel, entitled “Peaceful Assembly: From Occupy to Taksim Square,” the legal scholars debated whether obstructions to peaceful assemblies were beneficial to the democratic process, in light of large-scale protests like Occupy Wall Street and the demonstrations that unfolded in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in May.

Gerald L. Neuman ‘73, law professor and co-director of the Human Rights Program at the Law School, opened the discussion by providing a historical overview of the right to assembly. Drawing from excerpts from the Constitution and other sources, Neuman said that the perceived ubiquity of the right to assembly in international documents was in fact misleading.

“A lot of international action on the subject of peaceful assembly has been raised, but there are still a lot more questions than answers,” Neuman said.

The discussion was framed around a question posed by Neuman on whether the constitutionally protected right to assembly could become “punishable civil disobedience.”

Deborah A. Popowski, a lecturer at the Law School, said the United States had weaker legal protections for the right to assembly than the international human rights framework would suggest. Popowski said that the permission construct, or the requirement of assemblers to receive a permit before action, was an affront to the spirit of the right.

“The idea to ask for permission to express a human right is contradictory to the fundamental purpose of human rights,” she said, adding that 7,762 arrests were made in 122 different U.S. cities from the Occupy Movement.

“It essentially stops the spontaneity, the momentum behind the protest itself.”

Not all of the panelists echoed Popowski’s sentiments.

“The reason you need permits is because you have competing rights,” Law School professor Charles Fried said. “And we need to adjudicate between those rights. That’s what the law is for.”

Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92 noted that peaceful assembly rights may also be dangerous.

“For example, with Mubarak’s regime, we had assemblers dismantle a dictatorship, an easy victory for those who value democratic values,” Feldman said, referring to the ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

“Well, an overwhelming amount of the same people at the same place and time brought down Morsi’s democratically elected regime one year later.”