The Metropolitan police officers broke the law in removing flags and banners from Free Tibet protesters. The Metropolitan Police has admitted that some officers broke the law in their handling of demonstrators during the state visit of Chinese President Jiang Zemin last October. In a High Court case brought by the Free Tibet Campaign, the police agreed to a declaration that "it was unlawful for individual officers to remove banners and flags from people solely on the basis that they were protesting against the Chinese regime on The Mall on 19 October 1999". People who tried to protest about China's human rights record had complained about police heavy handedness, which kept them away from President Jiang. Speaking about the declaration at the High Court, re the Chinese State Visit, Assistant Commissioner Ian Johnston said that police accepted that they did not get it right on every occasion. He said on a number of occasions during the first day of the visit, "officers faced great difficulties in making split-second decisions between people waving flags legitimately and those who broke barriers and ran towards the royal carriage." Free Tibet Campaign director Alison Reynolds said: "This is a victory for the democratic right to peaceful protest in this country - something sadly lacking in Chinese-occupied Tibet. "It stretches credibility to ask us to believe that all the officers in The Mall spontaneously made the same mistake by removing flags and banners." An additional carefully-worded Met Police declaration stated "that it would be unlawful to position police vans in front of protesters if the reason for doing so was to suppress free speech". The government denied ordering unlawful police handling of demonstrators during the Chinese president's UK visit. The Tories have accused the Foreign Office of giving the police guidance in suppressing demonstrations against Chinese policy in Tibet. Shadow foreign secretary Francis Maude said "It beggars belief that the police had no guidance at all. Indeed we know that there were meetings between the police and Foreign Office. We know the police sought guidance on the issue of how to deal with possible demonstrations because of the known sensitivity of the Chinese to such demonstrations of freedom and liberty." Liberal Democrat spokesman Menzies Campbell said he also believed the Foreign Office had put pressure on the police to use the "unnecessary heavy-handedness" which had been in evidence. And a former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, Mike Bennett, said there was "not a shadow of a doubt" that the action against the protesters had been taken for political reasons.