Civil Disobedience

When is it justifiable for protesters and activists to break the law for the sake of their cause?

Even in democracies, we only have a chance to have a say in how the country is run every four years or so, and then only indirectly by voting for a political party. This is insufficient for the opinions of the people to be heard properly, and in certain circumstances civil disobedience is a powerful method of making the will of the public count if it is being ignored. Against powerful interest groups who dominate politics through their financial muscle and control of the media, civil disobedience is also the only way to get attention for a cause.

Not every just cause can be pursued through the courts (e.g. the campaign for Indian indepence). Not every democracy has a written constitution or charter of rights, appeal to which allows the courts to override the will of the legislature (for example, the UK does not). Even in cases where a case could theoretically be taken through legal channels, the courts are often controlled by the same political elite as the government, and there is no guarantee of justice. And in any case, challenging an unjust law in court requires civil disobedience. Someone has to break that law deliberately, in order to be arrested and prosecuted for it, so that the case arrives in court in the first place.

If a certain law is oppressive it cannot be opposed in principle but obeyed in practice out of concern for legality - it must be broken. Not to do so implicates us too in repression. National laws cannot be the ultimate authority - men and women are also under higher laws. It was established in the Nuremberg trials that sometimes international laws must override national ones. Many Christian thinkers (such as Martin Luther King) and other philosophers have argued that the law of God, or “natural law” is paramount, and that national laws which do not accord with it are unjust and should be resisted. Even under the theory of social contract, the state can be resisted if it becomes oppressive and so breaks its side of the contract.

Civil disobedience has a history of overcoming oppression and unpopular policies where all other methods have failed. For example, Ghandi’s civil disobedience was instrumental in winning liberty for India, and Martin Luther King’s tactics won basic rights for black people in America. Recently, the riots in Indonesia protested against the despotic system of government that exists there. In all of these cases there was no other avenue open to redress grievances; law breaking, whether Ganhdi’s non-violent marches or King’s encouragement of the burning of rate books, was the only way to protest effectively.

In actual fact, it is the conflict with the authority that gives the protest its power and urgency, and brings an issue to a wider audience. The suffragettes, the civil rights movement and the anti-Apartheid struggle are all examples of an eventually successful cause that won by its confrontation with authority, where more sedate methods would simply not have succeeded. In all these cases, any violence against people was not initiated by the protesters, but began because of the heavy-handed and violent response of their oppressors.

Given a choice, anarchy is to be preferred to despotism. But this is a false choice, as in the real world campaigns of civil disobedience have not led to the breakdown of law and order generally, or the collapse of the state. Those who advocate civil disobedience are usually careful to set boundaries on their actions, setting out what kind of disobedience is justified and what is unjustifiable. Martin Luther King, for example, held that justice demanded that unjust laws (i.e. segregation laws) be broken, but that just laws (e.g. against trespass, violence against property or the person) must be upheld.