Know Your Rights
Definition
Know Your Rights (KYR) is the pre-action discipline of knowing and practising the legal rights that apply at the moment a protester meets the police, an immigration officer, or a private actor with state-sanctioned power. Jurisdiction-tagged, date-stamped, and explicitly not legal advice.
Three artefacts. A one-page printable card — the rights the protester can assert at a stop, in the local language, citing the local statute or constitutional article. A pre-action training on what to say and do at the moment of contact: silence scripts, the rule against consenting to searches, the rule against signing anything without a lawyer. A designated legal-observer team on the day — visible stewards whose presence changes the risk calculation for both sides.
KYR converts the law from something the protester hopes applies into something the protester can assert in real time under stress. It is a precondition for security-culture and pairs with jail-solidarity and legal-observers. It is distinguished from legal advice (which requires a lawyer–client relationship) by its pedagogical, pre-action character.
FAQ
What is know your rights?
Know your rights is the pre-action discipline of knowing and practising the legal rights that apply at the moment a protester meets police, an immigration officer, or a private actor with state-sanctioned power. It is jurisdiction-tagged, date-stamped, and explicitly not legal advice. The goal is to convert abstract law into something a protester can assert in real time under stress, rather than something they merely hope applies.
What are the three artefacts a KYR program produces?
A KYR program produces three artefacts. First, a one-page printable card listing the rights a protester can assert at a stop, in the local language and citing the local statute. Second, a pre-action training covering what to say and do at contact: silence scripts, the rule against consenting to searches, and the rule against signing without a lawyer. Third, a designated legal-observer team, visible stewards whose presence changes the risk calculation.
Why does KYR matter at the moment of contact?
KYR converts the law from something the protester hopes applies into something they can assert in real time under stress. A right that is only understood abstractly collapses the instant a badge appears; rehearsed scripts and a one-page card restore the protester’s ability to invoke the statute on the spot. The discipline is pre-action precisely because legal advice requires a lawyer-client relationship and cannot be improvised in the street.
How is know-your-rights different from legal advice?
Know-your-rights is distinguished from legal advice by its pedagogical, pre-action character. Legal advice requires a lawyer-client relationship and is delivered case-by-case by a licensed attorney. KYR instead generalises the baseline rights any protester can assert in a jurisdiction and trains them in advance. The KYR card and rehearsal session sit upstream of any legal matter, not inside one.
Full page: [[know-your-rights]].