a.dironco@essex.ac.uk. 3 In Belgium, for example, incivilities are tackled with "municipal administrative sanctions" (gementelijke administratieve sancties); in Germany and Slovenia, they are mostly considered violations (Ordnungswidrigkeiten, prekrški), which form part of the criminal law, even though they are not criminal offences in the strict sense. Antisocial behaviour orders (ASBOs), massively used throughout England and Wales since 1999, before the new antisocial behaviour legislation of 2014 coming into force, were civil-law orders, when -if breached -gained a criminal law nature.

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In recent years, the legislators in the UK, Italy and Belgium have progressively empowered local authorities to subject sometimes already criminalised and harmful, but also some relatively harmless uncivil conduct to intrusive and punitive measures deeply affecting individuals' rights. However, judicial action in these three countries has been recently trying to restrain the (illegitimate) use of penalising powers of local authorities by delivering interesting liberty-safeguarding decisions. This paper firstly describes the (expanded) regulation of incivilities in the three aforesaid European countries. Secondly, it focuses on two criteria that inform judicial review of legislative and administrative action, namely the principle of legality and the principle of proportionality. Thirdly, it examines the case law of English, Welsh and Scottish courts, along with Italian and Belgian courts, and shows how courts can safeguard the individual's rights and freedoms against (illegitimate) penalisation of conduct that is deemed anti-social or uncivil at the local level.

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