The Crime and Policing Bill was introduced to Parliament on 25 February 2025. The Bill builds on the Labour party manifesto commitment to “take back our streets”, and contains a wide-ranging scope of provisions aiming at tackling violence, antisocial behaviour and enhancing public confidence in the criminal justice system. Having passed through the Commons in June this year, the Bill is currently at the Committee stage in the Lords until 27 January 2026. The Bill creates an offence of concealing identity at a protest. After outlining the mechanics of the proposed offence, this post will highlight potential conflicts with the freedoms of expression and assembly as protected by Articles 10 and 11 of the ECHR. The offence will then be considered within the context of growing anti-protest law in Britain. 

The proposed offence 

Clause 118 of the Bill creates an offence of “wearing or otherwise using an item that conceals their identity or another person’s identity” within a public place that is in a locality designated through the procedure outlined in Clause 119. A constable can designate a public space as a locality if a protest is taking place which involves, or likely involves, the commission of an offence, and it is expedient to designate the locality to prevent or limit the commission of offences. The area can only be designated for a specific period not exceeding 24 hours and the public must be notified. A locality may be designated for a further 24 hours if it is expedient to do so, having regard to any offences committed in connection with the protest or which are reasonably suspected to have been committed. Where a locality has been designated, persons concealing their identity at protests within it are liable to one month imprisonment or up to a £1000 fine. The Bill provides for defences in cases where a face covering is worn for health, religious or work purposes.

The police have an existing power under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to deal with masked protesters. Section 60AA(2) gives any constable in uniform the power “to require any person to remove any item which the constable reasonably believes the person is wearing wholly or mainly for the purpose of concealing his identity”. Additionally, section 60AA(3) permits police officers above the rank of inspector to authorise the section 60AA(2) power within any locality in which they reasonably believe that activities may take place which will likely involve the commission of offences and that “it is expedient, in order to prevent or control the activities, to give an authorisation”. Any person failing to remove an item when required by a constable under this power faces up to one month’s imprisonment or a fine of £1000. The police have claimed that a new offence is required because when using their powers under section 60AA, “individuals may follow the initial direction of an officer to remove their face covering, but they can then move to a new area of the crowd and redeploy the face covering later”, meaning that officers cannot tell which individuals have already been directed to remove coverings and who are therefore committing the offence by wearing them again. The proposed offence resolves this issue by creating what is in essence a ”no mask zone”, within which any protesters wearing a mask can immediately be arrested provided the designation procedure of the locality has been lawfully followed. 

Human rights implications 

The risk of violence and proportionality

The Venice Commission and Office For Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE) guidelines on Article 11 ECHR explain that face coverings should not be routinely prohibited “where there is no demonstrable evidence of imminent violence”. In this vein, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe Michael O’Flaherty, has written to the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to raise questions of the necessity and proportionality of the offence. There would be difficulties in arguing that mass arrests for wearing coverings in the “no mask zone” would be proportionate to an aim of protecting public order. Protests in the UK often occur with few instances of violence or disorder. The most recent largescale pro-Palestine protest on 4 October 2025 saw out of nearly 500 arrests, just one for common assault. At the Tommy Robinson “Unite the Kingdom” rally, only 24 persons out of an estimated 150,000 were arrested for violence. Environmental protests, the biggest example of mass civil disobedience in recent times, have invariably proceeded peacefully. In the very exceptional instances where isolated masked protesters may be reasonably suspected to commit offences, it does not logically follow that all protesters in a demonstration must also be forced to remove their masks. 

In expressing their concerns for the ban, six Special Rapporteurs for the UN have stated that the wearing of masks “should not be a presumption of violent intent.” This observation is at the nucleus of the difficulties with the proportionality of the offence. In the designation of a “no face-mask zone”, a constable need only have a reasonable belief that a protest is likely to involve any offence, and it is expedient to prevent such offences from being committed. The difficulty is that wearing face coverings is commonly associated with violence, evoking images of thugs in balaclavas or terrorists. Police are not immune from these preconceptions. Earlier this year, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) dealt with a case where German police had arrested a protester for wearing a visor with the words “smash capitalism” displayed, claiming it breached restrictions on carrying “protective weapons” during protests. (Russ v Germany App. No. 44241/20 ECHR2025 §10). The German Government argued that the visor had an “aggression-stimulating effect” which constituted a threat to public safety (§53). The Court reiterated that particular scrutiny must be exercised by domestic courts when criminal sanctions are imposed in connection with participation in peaceful assemblies (§53, 55). The domestic courts had not examined carefully whether the rather rudimentary nature of the mask actually posed a threat to public safety, and therefore the conviction was a disproportionate interference with Article 11 (§57). The ruling shows that police in order to act consistently with Article 11 they cannot simply infer from face coverings, even those with a protective quality about them, a threat to public order without reasonable evidence of the nature of the demonstration and the individual’s intent.  In practice, therefore, there is the risk that the predisposition people have of associating face coverings with violence displaces the very legitimate reasons protesters may have for using masks. These are outlined below.

Expressive purposes of face coverings

Venice Commission and OSCE guidelines on Article 11 ECHR state that “the wearing of masks and face coverings at assemblies for expressive purposes is a form of communication protected by the rights to freedom of speech and assembly.” Protesters may choose to wear masks out of the expressive value a face covering provides. In recent pro-Palestine protests, many individuals can be seen wearing keffiyehs, black and white scarves symbolising Palestinian identity, first used during the Arab Revolt against British rule in the 1930s. Wearing keffiyehs for protesters allows them to express their political solidarity with the Palestinian people. In environmental protests, Extinction Rebellion protesters have utilised face masks to highlight the effects of air pollution. In one case, environmental protesters dressed as a “murder of crows” with plague doctor masks staged “die-ins” at banks, aiming to expose their fossil fuel investments. 

The expressive value of face coverings was under consideration at the ECtHR in 2022. Mrs Ibragimova was convicted for breaching Russia’s ban on wearing face masks during protest after having worn a green, knitted balaclava during a peaceful solo demonstration (Ibragimova v Russia App. No. 68537/13 ECHR2022). Her protest was against the criminal convictions of the punk group Pussy Riot, with the balaclava resembling those worn during the group’s performances. In examining whether there was a violation of Article 10 on freedom of expression, the Court criticised the domestic court for not examining the “symbolic meaning” of the covering within the context of her expression and the level of protection it should have received, and a violation of Article 10 was found (§33). 

These examples link to the aesthetic quality of protests, which permit protesters to communicate their ideas to the public and gain wider support for their programme of change. Banning face masks in designated protests prohibits the very ability of performative protests to do this, neutralising their effectiveness in transmitting ideas to the public sphere. It is particularly concerning in the context of pro-Palestine protests, where wearing keffiyehs is persistently being associated with support for the terrorist group Hamas. As a consequence, a constable may conflate hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters wearing keffiyehs with the likely occurrence of criminality and institute a “no face mask zone,” despite the majority of pro-Palestine protesters having demonstrated nonviolently in the past. 

Privacy concerns of protesters

Special Rapporteurs for the UN have emphasised that the right to privacy includes “the right of individuals to participate anonymously in protests.” Many of those who wear masks at protests are worried about their employers knowing their political views or are anxious due to having precarious immigration statuses. Above all, there is a concern of police surveillance and intelligence-gathering. In the UK, live facial recognition technology (LFRT) has been used at various gatherings, including Notting Hill Carnival, the Coronation of King Charles III and the 2023 British Grand Prix at Silvestone, in the latter case specifically to stop a repeat of climate protects which had occurred the previous year. Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has stated that LFRT has yet to be used in protests, acknowledging any such use would need to be balanced with its “chilling effect”. But the use of  LFRT at peaceful protests is occurring elsewhere; the ECtHR has recently considered a case where Russia had used LFRT to track down a peaceful protester (Glukhin v Russia App. No. 11519/20, ECHR 2024). Hungary has used the technology to target attendees of this year’s Budapest Pride. 

While it is not currently used in this context in the UK, protesters still have doubts over whether they can trust the police. Even before the advent of LFRT, the police have consistently taken photographs and videos of peaceful protesters, including children. In one instance, the police admitted to sending the Department for Work and Pensions video footage of a disabled anti-fracking protester in an “apparent attempt to have their disability benefits removed.” The nature of this pervasive surveillance was fully exposed in the case of 94-year-old seasoned anti-war campaigner Mr Catt, who had discovered the police had 66 record entries of his attendance of protests. The common law provides the police the power to obtain and store information gathered from surveillance for policing purposes, including the maintenance of public order. In Mr Catt’s case, evidence of his peaceful, anti-war views ended up on the National Special Brand Intelligence System (known as the “Extremism database”). The ECtHR found that there was a pressing need to obtain such information when monitoring protests, only finding an Article 8 right to privacy violation because the data was held on record for an indefinite period (Catt v UK App. No 43514/15 ECHR 2019 §126-127). 

Privacy concerns do not only relate to surveillance by the police. During the anti-fracking protests, fracking companies were also gathering surveillance on peaceful demonstrators to pass to the police. In one case, fracking giant Cuadrilla sent 180 pages of emails to Lancashire Police containing the Facebook posts of anti-fracking protesters. Furthermore, INEOS, UK Oil and Gas, and Europa Oil and Gas submitted evidence gathered by private security firms to further their cases in court for injunctions against protesters demonstrating within the vicinity of their fracking sites. 

The broader context

The proposed offence of concealing identity at protests must be viewed within the context of the growing corpus of anti-protest legislation. Even within the Bill there are other new protest-related offences, including the possession of pyrotechnic articles and the climbing of memorials, as well as restrictions on protests at places of worship. The Bill follows from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Act (PCSCA) 2022 and the Public Order Act (POA) 2023 enacted by the previous Conservative governments which largely targeted direct action tactics used by environmental protesters. Since the awful attack on a synagogue in Manchester, the Government has committed to add to the existing raft of protest laws. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has considered whether to “crackdown on pro-Palestine protest chants”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has vowed to allow police to “consider the cumulative impact of frequent protests” when deciding to impose conditions. The Government has also announced that a new criminal offence of protesting outside the houses of elected officials will be added to the Bill. 

There has been little discussion of exactly why so much anti-protest legislation has been enacted in a country priding itself on its liberal values and rich heritage of civil disobedience. Candice Delmas offers an interesting contribution to this dilemma. Delmas explains that the problem is our narrow conception of what civil disobedience entails. Drawn from sanitised interpretations of the civil rights movement moulded idealistically by John Rawls, the usual public understanding of civil disobedience is extremely narrow and historically inaccurate. For Rawls, acts qualified as justified civil disobedience when they are public, nonviolent, and a conscientious breach of the law done to bring about political change. This normative account creates such a high bar that only very few cases of civil disobedient protest in contemporary times would qualify. By clinging to this narrow conception of justified civil disobedience born out of a classical liberal account, the government is seeking to impose restrictions on protest which do not conform to this definition, all while hailing itself as the head of a liberal democracy. Therefore, in this line of reasoning, face coverings in protest can be legitimately banned because protesters wearing masks are not engaged in acceptable civil disobedience since they are not breaking the law publicly and so are seeking to evade the legal consequences of their actions. Only by altering our preconceptions of what civil disobedience entails by acknowledging the messiness of our protest history can we truly recognise the value of protest. Delmas’s account therefore helps in allowing us to build a more persuasive critical understanding of anti-protest legislation that seeks to diminish its rightful place in British democracy. 

Conclusion

The UK is not the first to ban face coverings during protests. Such bans have generally followed unusually high frequencies of protests, for example, Hong Kong in 2019 with the pro-democracy protests, France in 2019 with the “yellow vests” demonstrations, and Ukraine in 2014 with the Maiden protests. On two occasions, the Venice Commission has recommended that Georgia (in 2025) and Russia (in 2013) remove bans on face coverings during protest. Drives to legislate against wearing masks can stem from legitimate concern with violent political activism, such as the face covering ban in Italy enacted in 1975 during the Anni di piombo (Years of Lead). However, such bans cannot be squared with the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of contemporary protest in Britain. Consequently, “no mask zones” will often run the risk of disproportionate interferences with the rights to freedom of assembly and expression. Perhaps by broadening our traditional conception of civil disobedience can we then acknowledge the natural place of a variation of acceptable protests at the heart of our democracy against concerted efforts to constrain it.  

Many thanks to Hayley Stremitzer and Professors Se-shauna Wheatle and Paul Scott for their insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Nathan Whetton is a PhD candidate at the LSE Law School researching developments in protest law. 

(Suggested citation: N. Whetton, ‘Legislating against concealing identity at protests’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (12th November 2025) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))