A STUDENT has been banned from taking pictures of his own girlfriend after he was served with a High Court injunction for interviewing animal rights protesters as part of his university project.
Matthew Harrison, 20, of Summertown, Oxford, was served with the injunction by Oxford University staff after he spent an hour talking to campaigners at a protest in South Parks Road on Thursday. The Falmouth College of Arts student went along to find case studies to interview for his English and Media Studies degree project.
His girlfriend, 20, who did not want to be named, was also served with the injunction. As a relative of a university employee, she is now both protected and restricted by the injunction and cannot take a photograph of herself or her vehicle. Mr Harrison is unable to photograph his girlfriend without breaching the injunction and neither are allowed to loiter within 50 yards of the partially-built animal research laboratory in South Parks Road.
The university was granted the injunction in November to restrict the activities of animal rights campaigners protesting about the centre. Mr Harrison said: "I was just trying to find animal rights protesters to ask them questions for my project and now I'm banned from a street in the city I live in. I had a dietaphone with me and I was just chatting to them, taking a few notes and looking around to see what was happening. "As I was walking away they gave me this injunction. They didn't ask us anything or find out what we were doing there. We were quite taken aback. We would like to get the injunction taken off us but we don't know what to do."
Mel Broughton, a spokesman for the Speak animal rights campaign, said other passers-by were being served with injunctions just for talking to campaigners. He said: "It just shows the ludicrous nature of these injunctions and how over-zealous the university is being in serving them. "Many students and employees of the university are in the same ridiculous position of being a protester and a protected person."
A university spokesman said: "Injunctions are served on individuals attending the weekly protests in order to ensure that they are fully aware of the terms of the court order, and what would constitute a breach of it. "It is difficult to tell who is a protester and who is not - and so we have to ensure that all those who spend significant amounts of time at a protest are aware of the terms of the injunction. We hope that this has not caused unnecessary concern to Mr Harrison, who will remain totally unaffected by the order unless he were to do anything which would breach the terms of the injunction."
Construction work on the £18m research facility has not yet resumed since it was brought to a halt in July after contractors claimed they were being harassed by protesters.