Legal Commentary

World Youth Day 2008 is being held this summer in Sydney, Australia.  According to the event's official web site, "[o]rganised by the Catholic Church, WYD brings together young people from around the globe to celebrate and learn about their faith on a more regular basis.  WYD08 will be the largest event Australia has ever hosted. It will attract over 125,000 international visitors - more than the 2000 Olympics.  WYD08 will mark the first visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Australia."  (During the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, these events were huge, and quite formative, I'm told, for many young Catholics.)

Well, if you put on a big Catholic jamboree, with the Pope in attendance, in a free country, you are going to stir up conversation, debate, disagreement . . . and some protest (some of it, no doubt, malicious and offensive).  And so, local authorities have enacted a new, temporary set of regulations that "will allow police to arrest and fine people for 'causing annoyance' to World Youth Day participants."  In response, as this headline puts it, "Catholics are split on [the] freedom to annoy":

[The] prominent Catholic priest and lawyer Frank Brennan has condemned new police powers for World Youth Day as a "dreadful interference" with civil liberties and contrary to Catholic teaching on human rights.

Any thoughts?  What free-speech rule or principle (if any) should control this situation, and others like it?  Readers might want to check out this post, at Commonweal magazine's blog (where I got the story) and also the comments.