THE Metropolitan Police breached the rights of the organisers of a vigil for Sarah Everard with its handling of the planned event.

Heavy-handed officers dragged tearful women away from the candle-lit shrine during ugly clashes in Clapham, south London, following the murder of the 33-year-old by former cop Wayne Couzens.

Reclaim These Streets (RTS) proposed the socially-distanced event near to where she went missing in March last year.

It was advertised as a quiet, reflective gathering – but things turned violent, with women being pinned to the ground and hauled away in handcuffs.

Photos and videos sparked calls for then-Met Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick to quit.

However, she refused to resign, instead insisting she "felt for her officers".

Four women brought a legal challenge against the force over its "grotesque" handling of the event, which was also intended to be a protest about violence against women.

And today the High Court ruled in their favour – a win RTS hailed as a "victory for all women".

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At a two-day hearing in January, Jessica Leigh, Anna Birley, Henna Shah and Jamie Klingler argued that decisions made by the Met in advance of the planned vigil amounted to a breach of their human rights to freedom of speech and assembly.

They also said the force did not assess the potential risk to public health.

The women were forced to withdraw from organising the event after police told them they would face fines of £10,000 each and possible prosecution if it went ahead due to Covid restrictions at the time.

A spontaneous vigil and protest took place instead.

In a ruling this morning, two senior judges upheld their claim, finding that the Met's decisions in the run up to the event were "not in accordance with the law".

In a summary of the ruling, Lord Justice Warby said: "The relevant decisions of the (Met) were to make statements at meetings, in letters, and in a press statement, to the effect that the Covid-19 regulations in force at the time meant that holding the vigil would be unlawful.

"Those statements interfered with the claimants' rights because each had a 'chilling effect' and made at least some causal contribution to the decision to cancel the vigil.

"None of the (force's) decisions was in accordance with the law; the evidence showed that the (force) failed to perform its legal duty to consider whether the claimants might have a reasonable excuse for holding the gathering, or to conduct the fact-specific proportionality assessment required in order to perform that duty."

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