Unlawful assembly - should such a thing exist?

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In Britain and Canada at least there's this concept of Unlawful Assembly. In Canada it's defined as a group of two people or more that the neighbours have reasonable cause to believe will cause a tumult or whose presence would cause other people to cause a tumult. It's sort of a pre-riot, the police usually start by claiming there's an Unlawful Assembly before declaring that there's a Riot. Should such a thing exist? Here it seems that as soon as the police proclaim Unlawful Assembly they give themselves the right to pick up anyone in the vicinity, even people not in any group. The police by the way reserve for themselves the right to proclaim Unlawful Assembly at will, even if the conditions for such are not fulfilled. Those arrested face a summary criminal charge of Unlawful Assembly unless the municipality has a bylaw mirroring such allowing the ticketing of said individuals under the bylaw. A law also was passed in Canada recently mandating five year prison sentences to all those caught covering their faces in any way during an Unlawful Assembly.

Illegal alien protests should be unlawful, and so should demonstrations that destroy property or massively interfere with the lives of people that are bystanders - like the occupy movement does.

The Occupy movement does nothing of the sort and banning protests on purely political grounds is not considered to be acceptable. It's more customary to ban something that is politically incorrect on other grounds, such as declaring an Unlawful Assembly when the conditions are not fulfilled.

i would go as far as to say i would allow public gatherings of neo nazis and white supremacists, as much as their views appall me.

Show me a society that cannot choose its assocation and i will show you an enslaved one.

No. This kind of law is too open to be abused against the politically powerless. If the authorities are so concerned about the possibility of violence at a protest, they should first put out a firm notice that their undercover agents refrain from instigating said violence.

Sometimes it is necessary to be able to cover one's face in a demonstration and I have done so even though the city doesn't allow it.

We had a mass arrest here last week for so-called unlawful assembly and though they used the bylaw and not the Criminal Code, the whole thing was a farce. They boxed in everyone between two streets no matter if they were marching on the street or walking on the sidewalk on their own and this was the police's pound of flesh for having lost control earlier on with completely different people at the other side of the downtown.

I never claimed that Europe has diminished rights to assemble, I said that due to the shadier allegiances of police agencies it is more essential for protestors to excercise extra caution regarding their identity.

Especially since you have right wing websites like 'Redwatch' putting mugshots on the internet for the purposes of harrassing and assaulting progressive activitists.

Yes.

The definition of a riot in Canadian law is, "an unlawful assembly that has begun to disturb the peace tumultuously." The idea behind criminalizing unlawful assembly is that peace officers should have some means to deal with an demonstration before it becomes a riot. If we have to wait for the first brick to be thrown through a window, it is already too late.

Bear in mind, as well, that the reliance of the police upon section 63 of the Criminal Code is subject to Charter scrutiny. Clearly it may be an infringement on the guarantee of freedom of peaceful assembly (since an unlawful assembly need not have breached the peace, merely to give rise to a reasonable belief that it will), but whether it is an infringement that is saved by section 1 is a legitimate question for judicial scrutiny.

[Quick correction--in Canada an unlawful assembly is defined as three or more people, not two, it requires an intention to form a common purpose, and it must be their act of assembling that causes a fear from persons in the neighborhood that they will riot, or that they will needlessly and without cause provoke others to riot. It's a somewhat more restrictive definition than xenon13 has made out.]