This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The police acted legally when they arrested suspects they believed were planning a “zombie picnic” that would disrupt Prince William’s wedding to Kate Middleton in 2011, the European court of human rights (ECHR) has ruled.

In a significant ruling on the use of preventive detention, the Strasbourg court backed decisions by British judges on the legality of removing demonstrators from the streets before the ceremony.

The wedding ceremony on 29 April 2011 was attended by foreign royalty, heads of state and hundreds of thousands of spectators at a time when the threat level from international terrorism was assessed as “severe”.

Eight of those detained for several hours that day – Hannah Eiseman-Renyard, Brian Hicks, Edward Maltby, Patrick McCabe, Deborah Scordo-Mackie, Hannah Thompson, Daniel Randall and Daniel Rawnsley – had appealed to the ECHR claiming their right to liberty had been violated.

Lawyers for the applicants, who are variously British, Irish and British/Spanish nationals, argued that the detentions were arbitrary. The high court and the UK supreme court had previously rejected their claim.

The applicants were taken to different police stations and released without charge once the royal wedding was over. Their periods in custody ranged from two and a half to five and a half hours.

Hicks, who is active in republican politics, had wanted to attend a “Not the Royal Wedding” street party in Red Lion Square, the ECHR was told.

Eiseman-Renyard and Scordo-Mackie had intended to take part in a “zombie picnic”. According to information received by police, they intended to dress as zombies and hurl maggots as confetti at the royal wedding procession.

The other applicants had planned to participate in a republican protest in Trafalgar Square. Most had no previous convictions or cautions.

In its decision, the Strasbourg court unanimously rejected the appeals as inadmissable. The British courts, the European judges said, had “struck a fair balance between the applicants’ right to liberty and preventing them from disturbing the public order and causing danger to the public”.

The arrests had been necessary, an ECHR statement added, to “prevent the likelihood of an imminent breach of the peace, taking into account the crowd size, international interest and ‘severe’ threat level on the day of the royal wedding”.

The applicants had been released as soon as the imminent risk had passed and their detention had been for only a matter of hours, the court noted.