Oxford university seeks unprecedented injunction against animal rights activists

Animal rights militants face tougher bans

University asks court to limit laboratory protest and to protect all former staff and students

Mark Townsend, crime correspondent
Sunday May 14, 2006
The Observer

Oxford university is to seek an unprecedented injunction against animal rights activists this week amid evidence that extremists are launching a fresh campaign of violence.

More than half a million people, three times the population of Oxford itself, would be protected if the High Court tightens an existing injunction and safeguards all staff, students, former staff and alumni from activists who are trying to stop the construction of a £20m biomedical research laboratory at the university.

Lawyers for the university are hoping that the court will grant an extension of an exclusion zone around the university, will ban megaphones near campuses and limit the number of people who can attend a weekly protest from a current maximum of 50 people to 12. The court will also be asked to consider reducing the weekly demonstration from four hours to a maximum of 60 minutes, and for protests to be staged only between 1pm and 2pm.

If the court backs the university, campaigners will be banned from taking photographs or writing threats to anyone connected with the university, irrespective of whether or not they are linked to the controversial laboratory.

The measure would see all students, staff, alumni and contractors - along with their employees and shareholders, as well as hundreds of thousands of families linked to anyone connected to Oxford University - deemed 'protected people'. Recently the offices of an architecture firm working for the university were vandalised. An arson attack destroyed an Oxford college boathouse last July.

Fresh concern over the increasingly indiscriminate tactics of animal activists will be heard at the annual meeting this week of GlaxoSmithKline after small investors in the pharmaceuticals giant last week received threatening letters warning that, if they did not sell their shares, they would be named on the internet. Jean Pierre Garnier, chief executive of the firm, told The Observer: 'The problem of animal extremism must be addressed. In the UK it is an acute problem and there will be consequences for the science base and the country's economic wellbeing if it is not.'

Signs emerged yesterday, however, that businesses who have invested billions in the healh sector may about to begin fighting back. In a rare show of defiance, a group of major international financial institutions published a letter indicating they would continue supporting companies engaged in serious medical research even if they were linked to animal testing.

There has been a steady rise in attacks by animal rights extremists, many credited to the militant Animal Liberation Front. A 39-year-old man was recently charged after the discovery of home-made bombs at a Berkshire house belonging to a woman whose firm supplies a vivisection company. The devices were petrol bombs, which had been left under her car in the drive.

Three activists were jailed last Thursday for 12 years for waging a hate campaign that included the desecration of a grandmother's grave. . Last week activists daubed 'puppy killer' outside the Surrey home of Julian Heslop, chief financial officer at GlaxoSmithKline. On the same day, activists are believed to have targeted the home of a director of a company linked to animal research firm Huntingdon Life Sciences, and sprayed 'ALF' across his car. Even directors of tour operator Thomas Cook have been targeted because the company sells holidays to Mauritius, which activists claim belongs to the 'primate trade route'.

The building of the Oxford animal research lab is becoming one of the biggest causes of conflict. 'Every week staff and students are called scum, and their air sirens are extremely disruptive,' said a university spokesman. One contractor, Montpellier, abandoned work on the £20m extension to Oxford's Department of Experimental Psychology after a campaign of intimidation in 2004.