David Mead

David Mead is Professor of UK Human Rights Law at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The New Law of Peaceful Protest (Hart, 2010) as well as over a dozen articles on protest, public order, policing and political activism, alongside pieces on the operation of the HRA.

He has given evidence to Parliamentary committees both at Westminster and Holyrood, and been cited in reports. Throughout 2021 he was Parliamentary Academic Fellow with the JCHR. He has worked with the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions for the 2014 report on the use of force to quell protests, and in 2020 as part of the drafting work on General Comment 37. He was the joint author of the Civil Liberties section in the British Social Attitudes Survey 34 (2017). He has provided informal specialist assistance to counsel in several high-profile protest cases including, in 2021, DPP v Cuciurean, as well as providing expert evidence in both the Occupy LSX litigation, and in Trenton Oldfield’s (the boat race protester) deportation hearing. He has worked with the Open Society Justice Initiative, Greenpeace and Amnesty and, in the UK, Netpol, the network for policing monitoring. He is a member of Liberty's Policy Council, and Netpol's Lawyers' group.