Such kind of preposterous attitudes justified by said-to-be-legal dispositions is no British exclusivity, and “human rights” concerns of this sort can go even far beyond in other European countries.

On early 1997, in France, near Paris, I helped my wife opening her fast food store. No longer than three months later a crowd of aggressive and noisy youngsters began to gather everyday before the store entrance, thus deterring customers from coming in. Those youngsters repeatedly entered the store and behaved in a threatening manner with my wife, while others staged fighting before the windows which they repeatedly bumped into.
All our repeated calls for help to the French gendarmerie proved to be of no help. We where flatly answered that the French law enforcement system was powerless against people who are under 18, and that as long as those youngsters didn’t arm someone there was no legal ground for suing anyone.
After one year of such ordeal the youngster crowd could be made up of up to 20 noisy and aggressive people, and customers had gotten scarce, indeed.
My wife gave up her dream to have her own store. She got depressive and was forced to abandon her professional activity when serious depredations against the store began to happen nightly. Windows were broken and it strongly smelled urine all around the store. The crowd disappeared as soon as the store closed.

Last year, while casually narrating these sad events with a man who managed to make conspicuous his friendly relationship with the French gendarmerie, he answered me, in substance: “The trouble was that the money with which you created this store came from a foreign power.”
I was flabbergasted since this man was not supposed to know about all this before I told him about, and, as a matter of fact, the thus questioned money had been given to my wife by her father who, thanks to my recommendations, had previously made good profits on the stock market in investing on France Telecom, a French state owned company at that time.