Good news! Last night the Federal Court overturned the ridiculous law which could have seen people being fined up to $5500 for ‘annoying’ World Youth Day participants. The law, granted to police and emergency services, potentially allowed them to fine people for handing out condoms, or wearing t-shirts deemed offensive to Catholic sensibilites, and was widely criticised as being totally over-the-top, and a violation of civil rights.

RACHEL EVANS and Amber Pike handed out condoms on the steps of Sydney’s Federal Court yesterday - flushed with a ruling that struck out a World Youth Day law that made it a crime to annoy participants in the Catholic event. The NoToPope Coalition protesters object to several Catholic moral teachings and Ms Evans - emboldened by the court triumph - immediately went and handed more condoms to Catholic pilgrims posing for photographs outside a nearby church.

Wearing an anti-Pope T-shirt, for which she might previously have been fined as much as $5500, Ms Evans called it a “major victory for the protest movement”.

A full bench of the court, comprising Robert French, Catherine Branson and Margaret Stone, had ruled that part of the World Youth Day Act, passed by the NSW Parliament to keep order during this week’s events, “should not be interpreted as conferring powers that are repugnant to fundamental rights and freedoms at common law in the absence of clear authority from Parliament”.

The court struck the words “annoyance or” out of World Youth Day regulations, which originally referred to “conduct that causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event”.