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Everyone’s equal in the eyes of the law unless you are a football fan

17 February 2014

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With the World Cup in Brazil approaching, this timely article in the News Statesman looks at the policing tactics and practices deployed against football supporters. This includes the imposition of “bubbles” (all-encompassing police escorts to, during and after matches for away fans); the broad categorisation of supporters as “risk fans” based, seemingly based on a principle of ‘guilty by association’; and a presumption in favour of prosecution, rather than, for example, fixed penalty notices or cautions for those accused of breaking the law.

The authors (one of whom is a solicitor that represents football fans mistreated by the authorities) use a number of case studies to argue that football fans are subject to a different standard of law than society-at-large, and that “each time authority or mainstream opinion excuses the relaxation of the normal standards of justice and fairness by claiming it is done to make us all safer, we all in fact become that little bit less safe.”

See: Everyone’s equal in the eyes of the law unless you are a football fan

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