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05 May 2021 / Nicholas Dobson
Issue: 7931 / Categories: Features , Covid-19 , Public
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COVID-19 & the right to silence

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Amid the proliferation of COVID-related powers around the country, what of the long-standing common law right to silence? Nicholas Dobson reports
  • An appellant was under no obligation at common law to give his name and address to a police officer to enable issue of a fixed penalty notice under the Coronavirus Regulations.
  • Since there was also no such express requirement in those regulations, neither was the appellant under a statutory obligation to give his name and address to the police officer. His refusal was therefore not ‘wilful’ under section 89(2) of the Police Act 1996.

Words preceding many of my less pleasant memories were: ‘It’s for your own good!’ The tyranny of benignly malign intention! New Zealand author, Janet Frame, struck a similar note in 1961 when she wrote that: ‘For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction’. And writer and scholar CS Lewis argued that: ‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good

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