A Christian preacher will continue to appeal his conviction for breaching an abortion buffer zone in Ealing.
Stephen Green was convicted in 2024 for breaching a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) by holding a sign with Psalm 139:13.
The PSPO prohibits any ‘act of disapproval’ of abortion within the buffer zone.
Yesterday, he was denied permission from the High Court for a judicial review. The Christian Legal Centre will now help him take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Conviction for an ‘expression of disapproval’
The Crown Court ruled that the message amounted to an expression of disapproval related to abortion services and therefore fell within the PSPO’s prohibitions. It also concluded that his stated aim of protesting “buffer zones” was a “camouflage” for opposition to abortion provision.
In challenging the refusal to state a case, Mr Green argued that the Crown Court made fundamental legal errors. His principal contention was that the court wrongly concluded it did not need to conduct an individual proportionality assessment of his particular conduct and its impact on the rights at stake.
The Crown Court held that proportionality had already been determined when the PSPO was upheld in the earlier Dulgheriu case, despite the fact that the activities described in that litigation involved persistent, targeted, and sometimes confrontational behaviour towards clinic users, which Mr Green says bears no resemblance to his own quiet, solitary, and non‑interactive actions.
Mr Green maintains that where a criminal conviction is involved, one of the most serious interferences with freedom of expression, courts must assess whether applying the PSPO to the specific facts is necessary and proportionate. He argues that his peaceful conduct did not engage or disturb any clinic users and therefore could not justify criminal sanction without a fresh, fact‑sensitive balancing exercise.
He also challenges the Crown Court’s approach to the “reasonable excuse” defence, which treated inadvertence or mistake as the only possible justifications and excluded the possibility that exercising Convention rights might ever amount to a reasonable excuse within the zone. Mr Green argues that this effectively removes human‑rights protections altogether from PSPO enforcement, an outcome he says is legally unsustainable.
He also disputes the Crown Court’s view that any error on proportionality would be “academic”, insisting that a fresh, properly‑directed bench could reach a different conclusion.
Find out more about Stephen Green