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But is Prizefighting Legal?
The BBC recently decided to scrap the highly feted “celebrity boxing matches” featuring the likes of Ricky “Balboa” Gervais and “Granite” Grant Bovey. The reason appears to be threats made by the British Boxing Board of Control to revoke the licences of those members involved and its assertion that such matches were unlawful.
One might query whether indeed the sport is lawful under any circumstances. The sport of boxing is an anomaly in English law; it involves the deliberate infliction of pain but is exempt from criminal liability and immune from the rules of consent. Its legality can be traced back to the 19th-century case of R v Coney, although what this case actually established was that prizefighting was unlawful and sparring for points was deemed lawful by default.
The legality of boxing has been long discussed by academics and Parliament, the latter in two recent Law Commission consultation papers. The first was issued soon after the infamous “Spanner” case (R v Brown 1996) in which the House of Lords held that consent was not a defence to criminal charges for assault. The case arose out of bizarre and eye-watering sadomasochistic activities (between consenting homosexuals in the privacy of the home) involving sensitive body parts, planks of wood and nails.
In the House of Lords, Lord Mustill hit the nail on the head when he accepted that boxing was a lawful activity but specified that it was, “a special situation which . . . stands outside the law because society chooses to tolerate it”.
The legal exemption granted by the common law to sparring has since been extended to professional boxing. It has been presumed since Coney that professional boxing is allied to sparring as opposed to prizefights, but this supposition is debatable when one considers the nature of modern professional boxing. The increasing similitude of modern professional boxing and prizefighting suggests that the former has perhaps gained a deceptive exemption from the law.
In the 1975 Australian case of Pallante v Stadiums Pty Ltd, the judge had to consider whether or not a boxing match was in fact a prizefight in which case it would have been illegal. As nimbly as Mohammed Ali, the judge danced with definitions, stating that modern professional boxing is clearly not prizefighting because it “will often not take place in public” or “excite terror in the minds and hearts of those present” nor will it “ordinarily constitute a riot”. But the assertions in respect of prizefighting can also be said to be true of professional boxing. Professional boxing matches do not take place in public, as prizefights did, but they are in a public arena where spectators can watch and place bets, so satisfying the definition of prizefights.
In trying to justify the legality of contemporary boxing, it would seem that the learned judge may have undermined its status by likening it to the prizefighting that was banned more than 100 years ago.
At present the sport remains lawful as its immunity is so firmly enshrined in the criminal law. It may be that Parliament will have to enact specific legislation giving the sport an unambiguous immunity from the law. If not, and if it is challenged further, the sport may find itself in for the final count.
Ambi Sithamparanathan — THE TIMES, February 18, 2003
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