Category: Protest

  • “Democracy had well and truly broken down” over the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, a protester accused of toppling it has said.

    The memorial to the 17th century slave trader was ripped down during a Black Lives Matter march in the city centre on 7 June 2020.

    It became an iconic moment in the wave of anti-racism protests staged around the world in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in the US.

    Rhian Graham is one of four people on trial at Bristol Crown Court facing a charge of criminal damage.

    Petitions and previous protests failed

    Giving evidence on Monday, Graham pointed out that there have been campaigns to have the statue of Colston removed from the town centre going back to the 1920s.

    Multiple petitions and protests and even support from a Bristol MP had failed to bring about any change, she said.

    A plan to affix a new plaque on the statue detailing Colston’s role in the slave trade had petered out when the Society of Merchant Venturers – a local philanthropic organisation – intervened.

    The group, which administered much of Colston’s £70,000 legacy to the city after his death, wanted the proposed wording changed to ensure his philanthropy was mentioned before his role in the slave trade.

    It also wanted any mention of the trafficking of children removed.

    Black Lives Matter protests
    The statue of Edward Colston was thrown in Bristol Harbour (Ben Birchall/PA)

    Broken democracy

    Marvin Rees, Bristol’s Mayor, decided to halt the plan because he disagreed with how far the text on the new plaque had been diluted.

    Graham said Colston had “perfected” the slave trade, adding: “No amount of philanthropy excuses you from that amount of hurt and suffering.”

    She described the Society of Merchant Venturers as “an undemocratic body of people, wealthy people, who have a lot of power and influence in the city”.

    Graham added:

    It is that abuse of power that causes so much frustration – the abuse of power and their stepping in and not allowing the truth of history to be told.

    She continued:

    At that point, what do you do? How long must you ask to be heard and not be listened to?

    I believe the council should have done something earlier, I do know that our MP, Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) had been calling for it to come down since 2018 and nothing was happening.

    I believe democracy had well and truly broken down around that statue.

    “Over 100 years of dissent – someone should have listened.”

    Graham said that she had signed petitions to have the statue removed, but did not see any point in writing to her MP seeing as Debbonaire had already spoken out about it.

    “(The council) had long enough to recognise how much harm a monument to a slave trader does in a very multi-cultural city – it doesn’t take much to realise that harm,” Graham said.

    “Over 100 years of dissent – someone should have listened.”

    Graham has admitted going to the protest with a rope in her bag, and helping to pull the statue down, but denies the damage done was criminal.

    ”By removing that statue we were removing a great symbol of oppression that towers over our community and is an offence to so many,” she said.

    “That was an act of solidarity and compassion, not violence.”

    ‘The Colston statue: What next?’
    The statue of Edward Colston is now on display at the M Shed Museum (Ben Birchall/PA)

    Graham told the court she did not have a background in politics or activism but had become much more aware of racism and inequality after moving to Bristol five years ago.

    “From 2019 I started to make more friends who had more of a passion for history, politics and equality,” she said.

    “I felt a bit embarrassed about my own knowledge and felt I needed to try and engage more with the world.”

    Graham continued:

    Having grown up in a predominantly white neighbourhood in Norfolk I experienced a lot of casual racism and homophobia and sexism.

    I didn’t think of myself as racist but the more I understood the experience of a black person on a daily basis, I felt I had been a terrible ally and I feel like I could have been more supportive.

    The realisation of the privilege I have because of the skin colour I have made me feel like I needed to stand in solidarity for black lives.

    The trial, which is due to conclude at the end of this week, continues.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Call for opposition to counter ministers’ ‘cynical attempt to bypass parliamentary scrutiny’

    The Labour party has been urged to take advantage of a unique opportunity to vote down a raft of last-minute amendments to an already controversial crime bill, which human rights activists have described as “a dangerous power grab”.

    The 18 pages of amendments to the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill were introduced by government peers in November, on the day nine members of the protest group Insulate Britain appeared in court charged with contempt.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Tribal members and environmental advocates filed a lawsuit against the Oregon Department of Justice on Tuesday for “illegal domestic spying” through its Oregon TITAN Fusion Center – one of approximately 80 intelligence hubs tasked with surveilling potential domestic terrorists. 

    “It is astonishing and disturbing to become the target of a well-resourced secret police, solely because of my participation in peaceful rallies opposing a harmful fossil fuel pipeline across my ancestral lands,” Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, an environmental and Indigenous rights advocate, said in a press release

    Farrell-Smith is a plaintiff in the case and a member of the Klamath Tribe. She has protested against Jordan Cove, a 229-mile long natural gas pipeline that would have run through ancestral lands in Oregon. She has also created protest art and organized against a lithium mine in Nevada. 

    Other plaintiffs include Rowena Jackson, Francis Eatherington, and Sarah Westover. Jackson is also a member of the Klamath Tribe, a water protector, and works at the Klamath Tribes Administrative Office. Eatherington is president of the Oregon Women’s Land Trust, a conservation nonprofit. Westover was an organizer with No LNG Exports Coalition, an alliance of groups opposed to the Jordan Cove pipeline.  

    According to the lawsuit, “fusion centers” have little oversight and less is known about them. At least 3,000 state and federal employees work at fusion centers where they monitor individuals that pose possible domestic terrorist threats. Using tips from the public, social media, public records, and governmental materials, Oregon’s TITAN Fusion Center collects and shares data with “more than 170 local law enforcement agencies, dozens of federal and state intelligence hubs, and an unknown number of public and private partners,” the lawsuit states.  

    Following 9/11, at least 80 fusion centers have been created to prevent future terrorist attacks, but a 2012 Senate investigation found that they are ineffective and come at a cost of $330 million to taxpayers yearly. Originally created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the cost of funding them has largely shifted to states. According to the lawsuit, Oregon’s TITAN facility is run through Oregon’s Department of Justice’s Criminal Intelligence Division.

    The lawsuit, filed by the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, which partners with communities and police to promote accountability, claims that TITAN is illegally spying on environmental advocates that aren’t breaking the law. The Policing Project has also been involved with a Microsoft case concerning compulsory data sharing with law enforcement, and an audit of Ring, a video doorbell company that works with police departments across the country. 

    “None of the Plaintiffs engage in or support, nor have ever engaged in or supported, criminal activity that would warrant Oregon Department of Justice’s attention or fall within Oregon Department of Justice’s delegated powers,” the lawsuit states.

    Jeff Rosenthal, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in a press release that TITAN “has repeatedly abused its unchecked power over law-abiding Oregon citizens.” The lawsuit states that TITAN also used surveillance software to physically track the location of Black Lives Matter protestors, using the information to create a threat report against Oregon’s own Department of Justice’s director of civil rights, as well as creating reports on the Women’s March. 

    “There is not a single Oregon law or regulation that gives the state Department of Justice the power to run a generalized spy agency,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor and the founding director of the Policing Project, in a press release. “That TITAN exists without any legislative authority flouts the basic principles of democratic governance.” 

    In a statement, the Department of Justice told Portland’s KATU, “We are reviewing the lawsuit, and will respond in court, but on initial review many of the examples cited in the lawsuit occurred several years ago and have been addressed.” 

    Plaintiffs hope the lawsuit will result in an end to TITAN’s surveillance activities.

    “Civil rights and privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about fusion centers for years,” said Farhang Heydari, executive director of the Policing Project, in a statement. “But TITAN is one of the worst offenders.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous and environmental activists say they were illegally spied on on Dec 17, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A group of NHS workers have written an open letter in response to Boris Johnson’s message to healthcare staff. And it makes for uncomfortable reading – if you’re the PM, of course.

    Johnson: bare-faced cheek

    On Tuesday 14 December, Johnson released an open letter to NHS workers. In it, he was asking them for help with the coronavirus (Covid-19) booster vaccination programme. Johnson said:

    I would like to thank each and every one of you for your incredible efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. I know it has placed extraordinary strain on all NHS staff… On behalf of the whole country, I want to acknowledge and praise your extraordinary hard work.

    But some NHS staff were not happy with Johnson’s words. So, a group of them wrote a reply. It published the letter on Twitter. And the response to it has been huge.

    NHS Workers Say FU

    NHS Workers Say No is a grassroots campaign group. It’s been at the forefront of action against the Tory-created NHS crisis this year: from protests outside parliament, to huge petitions, via campaigning videos. NHS Workers Say No has been relentless in its fight for a safe NHS that pays it staff properly and works for everyone.  Now, it’s written an open letter to Johnson. It mimics the style of his letter. And it’s blown up on Twitter:

    The letter says, mocking the PM’s own words:

    Firstly, we would like to ask each and every one of you why, despite our incredible efforts, you continue to exploit us. The COVID-19 pandemic placed extraordinary strain on an already demoralised, devalued and depleted workforce, having spent ten years paying for your austerity measures. On behalf of the whole NHS workforce, and the rest of the country using our services, we want you to acknowledge the damage you have caused, apologise, and let someone else fix your mess.

    It then goes on to talk about the issues with staff shortages (nearly 100,000 to be precise); NHS pay (the dire government increase of 3%), and the physical, mental, and emotional impact all of this – plus the pandemic – has had on staff.

    “Please resign”

    The letter was written by Kirsty Brewerton, one of the founders of the group. She told The Canary:

    I wrote the letter because nobody seems to be listening, and nobody seems to care. Who is supporting frontline workers? Our government? No. Our employers? No. We can’t carry on like this, but we aren’t being given any other option.

    The letter ends by saying:

    We so wish we could thank you for all that you’ve done to support us through this, but in fact you’ve made it far more difficult for most of us. On behalf of the whole nation, please resign

    We all need to act

    Holly Turner from NHS Workers Say No told The Canary:

    There was a sense of outrage amongst NHS workers when we saw the pitiful ‘thank you’ letter from Johnson. We have been left in a vulnerable and dangerous position due to over ten years of austerity utterly decimating our services. We are sick to death of gestures, we need action.

    It’s now up to opposition politicians and the public to firstly support NHS workers – but also to force change in the NHS before the Tories do any more damage.

    Featured image via NHS Workers Say No and 10 Downing Street – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Syarhei Tsikhanouski arrested in 2020 as he prepared to challenge Alexander Lukashenko

    Syarhei Tsikhanouski, the husband of Belarus’s opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, has been sentenced to 18 years in jail for organising mass unrest and inciting social hatred, the official Belta news agency reported.

    Five supporters tried with Tsikhanouski were jailed for 14-16 years.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  •  

    The December 3, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview with the ACLU’s Vera Eidelman about anti-protest laws. Janine Jackson originally interviewed Eidelman for the July 2, 2021, show. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin211203Eidelman.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: What do the freedoms we tell ourselves define this country and its project actually mean in 2021? If you think the answers are to be found in history, you might be missing the point. The US is engaged in radical (“to the root”) debate right now about what democracy means, what civil liberties mean, and what kind of society we want to live in. We’re in history right now; this is what it looks like.

    So what are the front-burner issues in terms of free speech, rights of assembly, the right to protest—to disrupt business as usual, which we know is central to making actual change?

    Our next guest thinks about these questions every day. Vera Eidelman is staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Vera Eidelman.

    Vera Eidelman: Thank you so much for having me.

    Brandi Levy

    Brandi Levy, known as B.L. to the Supreme Court (photo via ACLU)

    JJ: I wanted to talk, first, about B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District. I know that many listeners haven’t heard anything about this case, but it really gets at: When do you lose your right to free speech or free expression? Can you talk a little bit about what was at stake in that case, and your response to the Court’s ruling?

    VE: Absolutely. So Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. was the most important case about young people’s free speech rights in the last 50 or so years. The issue at stake in that case was a school’s authority to discipline a student for what they said or expressed outside of school hours, off of school property, that was not harassing or threatening in any way.

    Our client in that case, “B.L.,” was, when the case began, a 14-year-old who had tried out for the varsity cheerleading team at her public school. She unfortunately didn’t make it onto varsity, and was very upset. And she took to Snapchat, on a weekend, at a local convenience store, with her friends, not wearing anything that reflected the school, not mentioning the school or anyone at the school by name; instead typing, “f school, f softball, f cheer, f everything,” on top of a photograph of her and her friend raising their middle fingers. (They did not say “f”; they used the actual word, just for clarity.)

    JJ: Right.

    VE: And the school suspended her from the cheerleading squad for the entire year.

    And the ACLU of Pennsylvania took up her case, arguing that the school could not discipline her under the diminished rules that attach to student speech rights inside of the school environment, given that she was out of school, speaking her mind on the weekend, online.

    And the Supreme Court ultimately agreed with us, holding that the school cannot apply the same diminished rule that attaches inside of school outside of school. Because otherwise, students would be carrying the schoolhouse on their back 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unable to ever fully explore their views, unable to fully express themselves, for fear of always worrying that they might be deemed “disruptive,” which is the standard that typically applies in schools.

    And the court also recognized that the school itself actually has an interest in enabling students to engage in dissenting and unpopular speech—recognizing, of course, that what that means in any particular school district will vary by the reality of that school district—because the school really is, in the words of Justice Breyer, a “nursery for democracy,” and one of the goals of the school should be to teach kids what it means to have free speech rights.

    JJ: And as a parent with an activist child, I hear that word “disruptive,” and it just sets something off, because obviously that is a contextual term, as you’ve just described. But that sounds a little worrisome, just on its face, at the level of language, to make that the standard.

    VE: Absolutely. That was the main thing that we were very worried about in this case, that the school might win in arguing that it can apply that very subjective viewpoint-based standard outside of the school.

    JJ: So, OK: Schools are nurseries to help kids develop their voice, and to learn that they are allowed to use their voice, and in terms of using it meaningfully, in terms of changing things. So then those young people become adults, and they want to go out in the street to use their voice. So now we’re at my second question, which is: This spate, not new but increasing, of anti-protest legislation. Can you just talk about the range of laws that we’re seeing spring up, and what they are doing or trying to do?

    Vera Eidelman

    Vera Eidelman: “We have…seen the continuation and deepening of the anti-democratic, anti-protest legislative trend around the country.”

    VE: Yes, unfortunately, we have, as you mentioned, seen the continuation and deepening of the anti-democratic, anti-protest legislative trend around the country. For at least the last five years now, we have seen legislators respond to vocal, powerful, full-throated advocacy, not by listening to what their constituents are saying, but instead by seeking to create new laws that would silence them.

    Examples of the types of laws range from increasing penalties on laws that already make something criminal—so, for example, laws that already criminalize trespass, or refusal to disperse, or failure to obey an officer; all of those things are already illegal, and these laws would seek to increase the penalties that attach. In some cases, the bills seek to increase the penalties, not just in terms of criminal time, which of course is incredibly impactful, but also in terms of restricting people’s access to public employment, to public office and even to public benefits; things like access to scholarships for school, food stamps and the like.

    In addition, some of these laws seek to really punish, not unlawful conduct, but association: the fact that people are in the same place at the same time. A number of the bills that have been proposed—including some even that have passed, for example, in Florida—are incredibly ambiguous as to whether they punish an individual who has themselves engaged in violence or property destruction, for example, or every other person around when that occurs, regardless of whether they were involved, regardless of what they themselves think of that conduct. So we’re really seeing a lot of bills, and even a few bills that have become law, that seek to criminalize association, criminalize the act of gathering together to make our voices heard.

    JJ: I think if I could pick out one thing, the idea of laws that say it’s OK to hit protesters with your car. I just think that even for folks who, you know, may have complicated feelings, that’s just mind-blowing. What’s going on with that?

    VE: I completely agree. And I think it’s particularly mind-blowing, given that these aren’t just hypotheticals. We know that Heather Heyer died in Charlottesville as a result of someone hitting her with his car; we’ve also seen many other protesters injured at protests by cars. And so I think it is a particularly perverse legislative trend that we are seeing. And a clear message that it sends to people who are thinking of joining with others and going out onto the streets is, “You better think twice, because you might get hit by a car—and if you are, you might have no recourse.”

    JJ: Exactly, exactly.

    Let me ask you, finally, about media, because I often have noticed that, broadly speaking, corporate media love people speaking up, until they’re an organized group and they’re speaking up in the street, and then somehow they move from being individuals with a voice, to “interested” activists, and it’s somehow different. It’s like, “Protest is great, but keep it quiet.”

    NPR: Wave Of 'Anti-Protest' Bills Could Threaten First Amendment

    NPR (4/30/21)

    And I see NPR, which has done all kinds of favorable coverage, but then I see this headline, “Wave of ‘Anti-Protest’ Bills…”—and “anti-protest” is in quotes, like maybe it’s not true—”Wave of ‘Anti-Protest’ Bills Could Threaten First Amendment.” Well, could and threaten; now we’re at two degrees of separation. And I just wonder if media are bringing home the threat that’s happening here.

    So that’s just me, but I would like to ask you: What would you like to see more of, maybe, from reporters, or maybe less of, in terms of coverage of this legislation, coverage of the protests, and coverage of the real fight that we’re in right now?

    VE: That’s an interesting question. I do think that one thing to keep in mind is that this really is an anti-democratic trend.

    JJ: Right.

    VE: I think there are ways in which it will not be surprising to see who these laws get applied against. But at the same time, at their core, they are taking aim at, where you started, one of our fundamental American rights: the right to protest. And that applies regardless of the message that is being expressed.

    And I think it’s important to keep in mind that this is legislation that will impact people, regardless of what they’re expressing, simply because they are seeking to do what is so deeply American: to join together, and speak out together, and be in the same place with other people who they want to associate with. And I think that that is the thing that legislators should really be ashamed for doing: the idea that they are trying to stop people from exercising one of their fundamental rights.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Vera Eidelman, she’s staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. They are online at ACLU.org. Vera Eidelman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    VE: Thank you very much for having me.

     

    The post ‘They Are Taking Aim at Our Fundamental American Right to Protest’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • RNZ Pacific

    Malaita province in Solomon Islands is planning to poll people on self-determination.

    It comes two weeks after a Malaitan-led protest against the national government in Honiara degenerated into a violent riot.

    The Malaita Premier, Daniel Suidani, said he was seeking the help of the United Nations in the referendum, which he hoped to have completed by the end of January.

    Suidani said the UN was involved in drawing up the Townsville Peace Agreement in 2000, which was an attempt to resolve prolonged ethnic violence on Guadalcanal.

    He said nothing had come from that agreement’s commitment to self-determination.

    “The issue of independence or maybe a referendum is quite important because we need to find out whether that idea is still in the minds of the people of Malaita. That is why I am announcing this referendum to be carried out as soon as possible,” he said.

    Earlier this week, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare defeated a motion of no confidence in him by 32 votes to 15 with two abstentions.

    It was moved by opposition leader Matthew Wale after major political unrest in the capital last month saw three days of rioting, looting and burning of businesses and properties in Honiara.

    Sogavare said he would defend the principles of democracy and the rule of law no matter the cost.

    In his first public statement since the vote, Sogavare said the Solomon Islands was a democratic country with a democratically-elected government and he did not resign because that would only bring the wrong message to future generations.

    Where is the legislation?
    The government is also being criticised for only passing one new law this year.

    Opposition MP and member for East ‘Are’are Peter Kenilorea Jr said the only law the government had passed in Parliament this year was an amendment to the Telecommunications Act.

    He said the government could not use the covid-19 pandemic as an excuse for not doing its job.

    “Just this year Fiji passed 34 Acts. They had community transmission. They worked,” he said.

    “Papua New Guinea had 15, and 43 last year. We cannot just leave our jobs just because of covid-19. We don’t even have community transmission.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • After 30 years in exile, it’s easy to doubt that it will ever be safe to live and work in Sudan. But the action being taken by young people shows democracy will rise again

    “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to a friend in 1941, just before the US entered the second world war. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins – it never will – but that it doesn’t die.”

    Growing up, I was always interested in politics, politics was the reason I had to leave Sudan at the age of 11. At school, we weren’t allowed to study or discuss it, and it was the same at home.For years, I lay in bed and listened to my father and his friends as they argued about politics and sang traditional songs during their weekend whisky rituals. They watched a new Arabic news channel, Al Jazeera, which aired from Qatar. All the journalism my father consumed about Sudan was from the London-based weekly opposition newspaper, Al Khartoum. The only time he turned on our dial-up internet was to visit Sudanese Online.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • RNZ Pacific

    The Solomon Islands prime minister came in for searing criticism when he faced a confidence vote in Parliament today.

    A motion of no confidence against Manasseh Sogavare was debated amid tight security in the capital Honiara, where hundreds of regional security forces have deployed following major political unrest less than two weeks ago.

    About 250 defence force and police personnel from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and New Zealand were on high alert in anticipation of potential unrest around the outcome of the vote.

    As expected, the pro-China prime minister survived the no confidence vote with the support of 32 MPs, while 15 voted against him.

    Local media reported that numerous local families departed from Honiara aboard interisland ferries to return to home villages to avoid potential unrest in the capital, where many shops and schools had also closed.

    The motion was tabled by opposition leader Matthew Wale, who has accused Sogavare of allowing corruption to fester, and of treating the people of Malaita province with contempt.

    Malaitans played a central role in the late November protest that sparked the unrest, which left extensive destruction in Honiara, prompting Sogavare’s request for regional security help.

    Suidani denies instigation claims
    Malaita’s provincial Premier Daniel Suidani, whose administration has fallen out with the national government, especially over the country’s move to switch diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China, has denied claims by the coalition that he instigated the unrest.

    Wale told Parliament that the actions of the rioters should not obscure the real issue behind the unrest.

    “We must condemn all the criminality in the strongest terms, but it pales, Mr Speaker, in comparison to the looting happening at the top,” he said.

    Speaking in favour of the motion, former prime minister Rick Hounipwela described Sogavare as the ultimate opportunist whose accession to prime minister over four stints “has always been under abnormal circumstances”.

    Blaming the prime minister for negligent management of the country’s finances, Hounipwela said the country’s corruption problem had deepened under Sogavare’s rule.

    “We’ve experienced huge tax exemptions worth millions of dollars given to the people who least needed it, usually the loggers and mining operators.”

    Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare
    Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare speaking in Parliament today … “When we are under attack from forces of evil, we must stand up for what is right.” Image: APR screenshot

    In today’s debate on the motion, Sogavare said the motion had been filed against the backdrop of an illegal attempted coup.

    ‘Stand up to tyranny’
    “When we are under attack from forces of evil, we must stand up for what is right, we must stand up to this tyranny. We cannot entertain violence being used to tear down a democratically elected government.”

    Sogavare rejected the opposition’s accusation of corruption against him.

    Hounipwela, the MP for Small Malaita, accused the prime minister of using the pandemic State of Emergency to give himself authoritarian powers.

    He also claimed Sogavare had used police to repress public criticism of his leadership, and of directing foreign embassies and high commissions in the country to notify the government of their moves around the provinces.

    “To vote against [the motion], members would be aiding and abetting his zeal for power and to rule this country with an iron fist. That’s what we see as a track record,” Hounipwela said.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • RNZ News

    An anti-vax protest that shut down the centre of Newmarket in New Zealand’s largest city Auckland today may have cost local businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost customers, says the local business association.

    Hundreds gathered at 11am at the Auckland Domain before heading to Westfield Newmarket shopping mall via Carlton Gore Road and Broadway.

    After gathering outside the mall, they then moved towards Government House in Epsom.

    Newmarket Business Association head Mark Knoff-Thomas said the local stores were “very disappointed” by the behaviour of the protesters.

    “We all accept that everyone has got the right to protest, but not when your protest ends up bringing a town centre to a standstill, where retailers and hospitality providers have to shut their doors just to be safe because there’s so many people storming down the street,” he said.

    “I think it is shameless behaviour and very, very misguided.”

    He said stores had high expectations for the day which had been shattered – the second day of Auckland opening up under red alert under the new traffic lights covid-19 system after almost four months in lockdown.

    ‘People got fed up’
    “This should have been one of the best Saturdays of the year for us and the protesters certainly put paid to that because after they moved through Broadway, everybody left because traffic was snarled up and people got fed up and went home.

    “It potentially lost Newmarket many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

    “I hope the protesters never come back to Newmarket ever again. If they want to protest, by all means do it somewhere where it doesn’t impact on business owners because it’s been one of the worst years for business people. Very stressful.

    “A lot of people are financially on the ropes and all the protesters have done today is add more stress to those people.”

    Earlier, Inspector Beth Houliston of Auckland police said officers were “closely monitoring” the protest activity.

    “Our focus remains balancing the safety of all protesters and the public, with the right to peacefully protest.”

    Traffic disrupted
    Houliston said traffic in the area had been disrupted by the protesters.

    “We would like to thank members of the public who have deferred their travel today.

    “We also acknowledge those that have been inconvenienced.

    “Police will follow-up any incidents of offending or concern identified during the protest activity.”

    The protest organisers were calling the rally ‘the Mass Exodus’.

    Protest in New Plymouth
    Meanwhile, anti-vaccination protesters have again taken to the streets of New Plymouth.

    About 200 protesters gathered at Puke Ariki before marching up Devon Street, the city’s main shopping area.

    They chanted ‘freedom’ and carried placards calling on the government to end the vaccine mandate.

    Many waved flags including campaign banners for former US president Donald Trump and the tino rangatiratanga or Māori flag, and the United Tribes of NZ flag.

    About 200 anti-vaxxer protesters march in New Plymouth on 4 December 2021
    About 200 protesters marched up Devon Street in New Plymouth today, calling on the government to end the vaccine mandate. Image: Robin Martin/RNZ

    Some of Auckland’s strict lockdown rules were eased yesterday, as the country moved to the new traffic light Covid-19 protection framework.

    Police say fewer people converged on central Auckland last night compared to pre-covid-19 times.

    But officers were kept busy dealing with disorder-related incidents, involving highly intoxicated people.

    In one case, a person is in a serious condition after being assaulted on Karangahape Road.

    A 22-year-old man has been charged with wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

    He was due to appear in the Auckland District Court today.

    98 new community cases
    The Ministry of Health reported 98 new community cases of covid-19 in New Zealand today, with cases in Auckland, Northland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Hawke’s Bay, Nelson Tasman and Canterbury.

    In a statement, the ministry said there were 73 cases in hospital, including seven people in intensive care.

    Today’s cases include three in Northland, 64 in Auckland, 21 in Waikato, six in the Bay of Plenty, one in Mangakino, two in Hawke’s Bay and one in Nelson Marlborough.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Dhias Suwandi in Jayapura

    Eight youths have been declared suspects on charges of makar (treason, subversion, rebellion) for flying the banned Papuan independence flag Morning Star at the Cenderawasih Sports Centre in the capital Jayapura this week on December 1.

    The Morning Star is a symbol used as a flag by the Free Papua Organisation (OPM) and by most civil society organisations.

    They have been identified by their initials MSY, YM, MY, MK, BM, FK, MP and MW — most of them university students.

    Flag-raising protests across the world were staged in solidarity with West Papuan calls for self-determination.

    The flag-raising commemorations marked the 60th anniversary of West Papua’s declaration of independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1961.

    The Cenderawasih Sports Centre flag-raising incident took place on Wednesday afternoon. Prior to holding the action, on November 30, the eight youths held a meeting in the vicinity of Asmara Maro, claimed police reports.

    The meeting was allegedly chaired by MY alias M who acted as the leader of the action and the flag raiser. MY also made the flag and the banner later carried by the suspects.

    Parliamentary march planned
    After flying the flag above the Cendrawasih Sports Centre (GOR), the youths had planned to march to the Papua Regional House of Representatives (DPRD).

    The banned Morning Star flag flies above Cenderawasih Sports Centre
    The banned Morning Star flag flies above Cenderawasih Sports Centre building in Jayapura, Papua, on “independence day” December 1. Image: Antara News

    Papua regional police public relations division head Senior Commissioner AM Kamal explained that seven of the youths were tasked with flying the flag and marching towards the Papua regional police headquarters (Mapolda) while carrying a banner with the Morning Star drawn on it.

    The eighth person meanwhile was tasked with documenting the action and spreading it on social media.

    The eight have been charged under Article 106 of the Criminal Code (KUHP) in conjunction with Article 110 of the KUHP in conjunction with Article 87 of the KUHP on “plotting to commit crimes against state security”.

    “Currently the eight suspects are being held at the Papua Mapolda detention centre for further legal processing,” said Kamal.

    Amnesty International criticism
    On Friday, Amnesty International criticised the arrests, among 34 detentions this week of Papuan protesters, as well as 19 injuries sustained at demonstrations elsewhere in Indonesia.

    “No one should be detained simply for peacefully expressing their political opinions,” said Amnesty’s Indonesia director Usman Hamid, news agency reports said.

    Police did not immediately respond to media requests for comment on Amnesty’s statement.

    In June 2020, Indonesia sentenced to prison seven Papuans for treason, while Papuan independence figure Filep Karma spent 11 years in prison after raising the banned flag publicly. He was released in 2015.

    In Ambon, Maluku, Beritabeta reports that a demonstration by scores of Papuan students marking Independence Day ended in chaos after it was forcibly broken up by police.

    The Papuan students, who are undergoing their studies in Ambon, refused to accept the police actions and fought back.

    The police finally succeeded in forcing the demonstrators back, who were wearing clothing and accessories with the Morning Star flag on them.

    Ambon and the Ambon islands municipal police public relations division head, Second Police Inspector Izaac Leatemia, told journalists that the demonstration was broken up because the protesters did not have a permit from police.

    Attacked by vigilantes
    In the Balinese provincial capital of Denpasar, a protest by the Bali City Committee Papua Student Alliance (AMP-KKB) and the Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua (FRI-WP) ended in a clash with a vigilante group called the Nusantara Garuda Patriots (PGN), reports Detik.com.

    The AMP-KKB said that 12 of its members were injured during the clash.

    “Based on our data from the AMP there were 12 of our comrades (who suffered injuries). Some were kicked by the PGN, and then there were comrades who were hit by rocks,”, said AMP-KKB chairperson Yesaya Gobay.

    Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was “Kibarkan Bendera Bintang Kejora di Sebelah Polda Papua, 8 Pemuda di Jayapura Jadi Tersangka Makar”.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  •  

    Washington Post depiction of the January 6 Insurrection

    Washington Post (10/31/21)

    This week on CounterSpin, two archival interviews: As the year nears its end, it’s hard not to think back to how it started—with the violent assault on the Capitol by a crowd intent on preventing the declaration of Joe Biden as president. We spoke with organizer and strategist Dorothee Benz the next day about the import of the events of January 6.

          CounterSpin211203Benz.mp3

     

    Deadly Charlottesville car attack

    ABC News (8/13/17)

    Also on the show: While response to the insurrection came slowly, states have been cracking down on peaceful protests. We talked about that worrying trend with the ACLU’s Vera Eidelman around the Fourth of July.

          CounterSpin211203Eidelman.mp3

    The post Dorothee Benz on January 6 Insurrection, Vera Eidelman on Anti-Protest Laws appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • On 1 December, higher education staff and University and College Union (UCU) members launched their first of three days of strike action against pension cuts, racial, gender and disability pay gaps, low wages, unpaid hours, and excessive workloads. University staff across the UK have taken to picket lines – and social media – to demand that university bosses take action to challenge poor wages and entrenched exploitation and inequality in the higher education sector.

    Unjust pensions, pay and conditions

    According to the union, “UCU members are taking action over falling pay, the gender and ethnic pay gap, precarious employment practices, and unsafe workloads”. Since 2009, university staff have seen real terms pay cuts of nearly 20%. And cuts proposed by Universities UK (UUK) will see the average pension drop by around 36% (despite claiming that the proposed cuts would lead to 10% to 18% drop).

    The casualisation of work in higher education means that today, nearly 90,000 university staff are employed on insecure contracts. Reflecting the limited rights, protections and security such arrangements provide, University of Bristol researcher Dr Eleanor Johnson shared:

    And Dr Eve Hayes said:

    Striking staff are also challenging excessive workloads in higher education. According to an Education Support report, excessive workloads and unpaid hours are causing a mental health crisis among higher education workers. The report found that 79% of respondents struggled with an intense, excessive workload. It also found that over half of respondents displayed signs of depression.

    Speaking to the entrenched exploitation of higher education workers, University of St Andrews lecturer Roxani Krystalli shared:

    University staff are also taking industrial action to challenge unjust pay gaps. As it stands, the pay gap between Black and white higher education staff is currently 17%. The average gender pay gap is 15.1%. And the disability pay gap is at 9%. A UCU survey found that marginalised university staff are disproportionately impacted by excessive workloads and insecure contracts.

    Contextualising racial and gender pay gaps in the sector, King’s College’s UCU shared: 

    Higher education staff unite

    Announcing the first day of industrial action, the UCU tweeted:

    Striking staff are demanding the reversal of pension cuts, and a £2.5k rise in pay for all staff. They are also demanding “action to tackle unmanageable workloads, pay inequality and insecure contracts”.

    Threatening further industrial action if university bosses fail to meet these demands, UCU general secretary Jo Grady said:

    If they continue to ignore the modest demands of staff then we will be forced to take further industrial action in the new year, which even more branches will join.

    On 1 December, approximately 50,000 staff from 58 higher education institutions took to picket lines nationwide to demand fair pensions, pay and conditions.

    Striking staff took to social media to share pictures from picket lines up and down the country. The University of York’s UCU shared:

    And Leeds Student Staff Solidarity tweeted:

    Highlighting that the marketisation of the UK’s higher education system impacts all workers in the sector, UCU posted:

    And striking staff at universities including the London School of Economics (LSE) held teach-ins:

    Solidarity with striking higher education workers

    An overwhelming number of students have met the industrial action with outpourings of support and solidarity for striking university staff. Indeed, according to the National Union of Students (NUS), 73% of students support industrial action. On 1 December, students took to picket lines across the country to express solidarity with striking higher education workers. NUS president Larissa Kennedy tweeted:

    Student activists from the Red Square Movement came together to block UUK’s head office in solidarity with striking higher education workers:

    Students occupied the University of Manchester’s business school to support the ongoing strike. One student posted:

    And over 330 Birbeck University students have signed an open letter to senior leadership, stating “we will continue to support staff as they fight for better working conditions – their working conditions are our learning conditions”:

    Meanwhile, the University of Sussex Students’ Union has organised a march and rally in solidarity with local striking staff:

    Join the movement

    The strike action is due to continue until Friday 3 December. In the meantime, UCU is urging supporters to join their local picket line to support striking higher education staff. The union has shared a list of all institutions taking part in the industrial action. UCU is leading a march and rally in London on 3 December. The union is encouraging anyone who can’t make it to the picket lines to express solidarity on social media, and to donate to UCU’s strike fund. It is vital that we – particularly those of us who are students – unite in solidarity with striking university staff and against the marketisation of higher education.

    Featured image via Twitter Screengrab – @UM_UCU

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  •  

    The not guilty verdict on November 19 in the Kyle Rittenhouse case gave corporate media the opportunity to take a measured approach to systemic violence in the US—and for the most part, they fell short.

    The jury’s finding came after more than a year of a political back and forth over the killing of two protesters and the wounding of a third during a Black Lives Matter uprising in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 25, 2020.

    The trial was marked by early allegations of witness tampering and Judge Bruce Schroeder constantly interfering in the case on Rittenhouse’s behalf, including barring prosecutors from bringing up the defendant’s meetings with members of the Proud Boys and a previous fight he had been in. Though those points were raised in some media during the case, they were largely dismissed in the wake of the verdict, or portrayed as incidental to the system working. Rather, the jury’s decision was framed as a verdict that upheld the right to self defense, never mind the fact that that right tends to appear and disappear depending on whose self is in danger.

    ‘Justice was done’

    CNN: Sears on Rittenhouse verdict: 'It's time to move on' and 'heal'

    Virginia Lt. Gov.-elect Winsome Sears (right) told Dana Bash (CNN, 11/21/21), “We ought to let the American justice system speak for itself.”

    Measured, respectable right-wing voices framed the Rittenhouse decision as the result of a criminal justice system that came to the right conclusion—while feeding into the idea that the shootings were so clearly justified they made any charges a farce.

    “Justice was done in that and the jury system works,” Former Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told Bret Baier on Fox News Sunday (11/21/21). “You know, I was a prosecutor for seven years, and those charges should never have been brought.”

    NBC’s Meet the Press’s Twitter account (11/21/21), meanwhile, framed the verdict as part of a legal system working to uphold a very specific principle of self defense:

    Kelly O’Donnell, Kristen Soltis Anderson, David Henderson and Rev. Al Sharpton join the Meet the Press roundtable to talk about the Rittenhouse verdict as “stand your ground” wins a victory in Rittenhouse trial.

    On CNN (11/21/21), Republican Virginia Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears told host Dana Bash that “we ought to let the American justice system speak for itself.” ABC reporter Terry Moran (11/21/21) told that network’s Martha Raddatz that Rittenhouse had “won this case on the witness stand,” because his defense lawyer prepared a line of questioning “structured right at the Wisconsin law of self-defense”—presenting the case and the lives lost as simply part of a hard fought, but abstract, debate.

    “It was not a crusade in that courtroom,” Moran added in a somberly approving tone. “​​It was a trial.”

    Persistent grievances

    Fox: Everything We Heard About Rittenhouse Was a Lie

    “What a sweet boy,” Tucker Carlson (Fox, 11/22/21) said of Rittenhouse.

    At Fox News, Tucker Carlson (11/22/21) aired an exclusive interview with Rittenhouse, and his Fox Nation show tailed the defendant through the court proceedings, enjoying unparalleled access.

    Though many in right-wing media delighted in the verdict, they still found grievances to air. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) termed the disapproval expressed by President Joe Biden over the verdict an example of “cancel culture” in an appearance on Justice With Judge Jeanine (11/20/21).

    Friday on Fox (11/19/21), Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro raised the possibility Rittenhouse could sue Biden for “defamation” over a September 30, 2020, tweet from last year (9/30/20) suggesting the shooter was a white supremacist.

    Geraldo Rivera disagreed about Biden’s liability, but paired it with an admission that in his view, Rittenhouse had a “clear-cut case of self-defense.” The media narrative on Fox is clear: The jury’s finding cannot be questioned in this case, and the validity of the Rittenhouse defense is an established fact.

    ‘Anger at the vipers’

    USA Today: From Kenosha riots to Kyle Rittenhouse trial, biased media coverage makes everyone angrier

    USA Today legal analyst Jonathan Turley (11/19/21) complained, “Many viewers may not have learned that Rittenhouse spent his time cleaning graffiti off the high school.”

    Elsewhere, conservative and right-leaning pundits turned their attention to the rest of the media and other perceived political enemies for their alleged roles in perpetuating a false narrative. The not guilty verdict conclusively debunked, in the view of conservative media, the supposedly widespread assumption by centrist media that Rittenhouse acted out of racial animus and in service of right-wing politics.

    In an opinion piece for USA Today (11/19/21), legal analyst Jonathan Turley called the reporting on the trial and Rittenhouse himself the result of “passion” overwhelming clear-eyed reasoning, and fretted that there would be more “misinformation” spread as political polarization continues.

    “The growing disconnect between actual crimes and their coverage is unlikely to change in our age of rage,” Turley wrote. “Rittenhouse had to be convicted to fulfill the narrative, and any acquittal had to be evidence of a racist jury picked to carry out racist justice.”

    Megyn Kelly, the former Fox and NBC star who now hosts a show on SiriusXM, tweeted that she had “relief for Kyle, yes, but also anger at the vipers who did this to him” in the minutes following the verdict while she was on air.

    ‘Deceitful and morally repugnant’

    TK News: The Rittenhouse Verdict is Only Shocking if You Followed the Last Year of Terrible Reporting

    Matt Taibbi (TK News, 11/19/21) decried “a year of pronouncing the ‘Kenosha shooter’ a murderer”—but failed to quote any journalists doing so.

    Substack bloggers got in on the attacks on media coverage as well. Hours after the trial ended, Glenn Greenwald wrote (11/19/21) wrote:

    I went live on Rumble to provide my views of why, after having watched the entire trial, I believed this verdict was just, and why the media narrative was particularly deceitful and morally repellent.

    Matt Taibbi (11/19/21) wrote:

    In a tinderbox situation like this one, it was reckless beyond belief for analysts to tell audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer, when many if not most of them had a good idea he would be acquitted. But that’s exactly what most outlets did.

    (Taibbi did not cite any examples of “analysts” at  “most outlets” who “[told] audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer.”)

    And Bari Weiss took the opportunity afforded by the not guilty verdict to reup her article from earlier in the week (11/17/21), which claimed the American people were “served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha”—unless, of course, they had listened to her fellow conservatives Jacob Siegel (Tablet, 8/24/20) and Jesse Singal (Substack, 11/10/21), who cast doubt on the official narrative in favor of Rittenhouse from the beginning.

    ‘This trial was a warning shot’

    AP: Rittenhouse acquittal tightens the political vise for Biden

    AP (11/21/21): “A difficult political atmosphere for President Joe Biden may have become even more treacherous with the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse.”

    More centrist networks did not ignore the role of race in the trial. On ABC’s This Week (11/21/21), attorney Channa Lloyd told Raddatz that if Rittenhouse had been Black, he likely would have faced a different outcome for killing two and wounding another. “Had Rittenhouse been an African-American young man…would the verdict have been the same?” Lloyd said. “Statistically, what we find is that it would not be.”

    On CBS’s Face the Nation (11/21/21), NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson said that it was hard to reconcile the experience of Black Americans in the US criminal justice system with the treatment received by Rittenhouse. “This trial was a warning shot,” he added, telling host Margaret Brennan that the verdict opened the door for more right-wing “vigilante justice.”

    Still, corporate media couldn’t help but turn the verdict into horse race coverage. The Associated Press (11/21/21), in an article Saturday headlined “Rittenhouse Acquittal Tightens the Political Vise for Biden,” warned that Biden and the Democrats could face political fallout from their comments about the trial.

    “The verdict in the case comes at a moment when Biden is trying to keep fellow Democrats focused on passing his massive social services and climate bill and hoping to turn the tide with Americans who have soured on his performance as president,” according to AP.

    It’s a message that’s unlikely to resonate with the victims, the killer or their respective supporters—and in that respect, it’s something of a centrist success.

    The post Corporate Media Celebrate Criminal Justice System—While Differing on Outcomes appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Eoin Higgins.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • An Insulate Britain protester who has been on hunger strike in prison for 13 days is being given hospital treatment, the campaign group said.

    Emma Smart was moved to the hospital wing at HMP Bronzefield in Ashford, Surrey, on Friday.

    She was jailed for four months on 17 November for breaching an injunction and immediately vowed to stop eating until the government moves to insulate homes.

    Hunger strike

    In a statement released by Insulate Britain, Smart said:

    The window of my cell in the hospital wing is blocked up and there is little natural light, in my previous cell I could see the birds and trees that line the prison fence.

    I have less time to go outside in the prison yard for exercise now.

    All of this is testing my resolve to continue, but I feel that not eating is the only thing I can do from prison to draw attention to those who will have to make the choice between heating and eating this winter.

    Insulate Britain members, including Smart’s husband Andy Smith, are to stage a 24-hour fast outside 10 Downing Street on Tuesday morning in solidarity with her, the group said.

    More protesters facing jail

    Smart is one of nine members of the group jailed for breaching an injunction designed to prevent the road blockades which have sparked anger among motorists and others affected by the protests.

    They appeared at the High Court on 17 November after they admitted breaching an injunction by taking part in a blockade at junction 25 of the M25 during the morning rush hour on October 8.

    Insulate Britain protests
    Insulate Britain activists including Emma Smart (back centre)

    They received sentences of between three and six months and ordered to pay £5,000 in costs each.

    A further nine Insulate Britain protesters are to appear at the High Court on 14 December to face a charge of contempt of court.

    Insulate Britain began a wave of protests in September and supporters have blocked the M25, roads in London including around Parliament, roads in Birmingham and Manchester and around the Port of Dover in Kent.

    The group is demanding that the government insulate Britain’s “leaky homes” and end deaths it says are caused by winter fuel shortages.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • NGOs believe raids, officially part of an embezzlement inquiry, are an attempt to ‘criminalise social movements’

    Rights activists in El Salvador said they will not be pressured into silence after prosecutors raided the offices of seven charities and groups in the Central American country.

    “They’re trying to criminalise social movements,” said Morena Herrera, a prominent women’s rights activist. “They can’t accept that they are in support of a better El Salvador.”

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Indigenous land defenders were in a British Columbia court Monday after they were arrested during police raids that took place on Wet’suwet’en territory Friday. During the raids, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrested 29 people, including Wet’suwet’en and Haudenosaunee land defenders, two people described as elders, two photojournalists and a supporting chief from the Gidimt’en clan.

    Those arrests, part of an ongoing, government-sanctioned effort to enable the construction of a proposed pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, have essentially cleared the way for the project to proceed unhindered.

    In recent weeks, tensions have escalated in the years-long conflict surrounding the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline, which is being built on the Wet’suwet’en yintah, or territory. The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs — who represent a traditional government that has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada — oppose the project and have made repeated efforts to evict the company, TC Energy, and its subcontractors from the territory.

    On November 14, after CGL ignored an order from the Gidimt’en clan to leave the territory, land defenders used a CGL construction vehicle to demolish a segment of road leading to remote man camps used to house hundreds of construction workers. The RCMP responded by sending dozens of officers from outside the area who raided multiple encampments at the end of last week after establishing an “exclusion zone” — an area that has been off limits to Wet’suwet’en and non-Wet’suwet’en people, including journalists, since last week’s raids began.

    In a press release, Jennifer Wickham, the media coordinator for the Gidimt’en camp, said CGL is seeking conditions that would bar Sleydo’ — a supporting chief from Gidimt’en clan and a prominent leader of the counter-pipeline movement who was arrested Friday — from returning to her home on Wet’suwet’en territory where she lives with her three children and her husband, a Haida man who was also arrested last week, despite not being actively involved in the recent blockades.

    Wickham said CGL also challenged the First Nation status of Sleydo’ and another Wet’suwet’en woman, a legal strategy designed to keep land defenders out of the area that Wickham called “completely racist and sexist” in a statement. “Allowing a private corporation to determine two Indigenous womens’ identities and allowing this corporation to deny our inherent rights to be Wet’suwet’en on our territory is a very dangerous precedent,” Wickham added.

    Indigenous-rights advocates have condemned the RCMP’s history of enforcing injunctions against Indigenous land defenders on behalf of companies in resource-extractive industries.

    “By dragging us through court and using injunctions against us, our Indigenous rights are being violated and are being given less consideration than climate-destroying corporations,” said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip (Penticton Indian Band), president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, in a statement.

    According to the RCMP, the Indigenous-led blockades “jeopardized the safety and wellness” of construction workers who were housed at the man camps, forcing the agency to mobilize what it dubbed a “rescue mission” in a press release.

    “RCMP should be assisting flood victims and communities, not out invading our Territory and arresting our peaceful people and supporters,” read a statement from the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, who referenced the devastating floods that washed through British Columbia last week.

    On November 14, land defenders gave the company eight hours, plus a two-hour extension, to vacate the area. Reports suggest that the company chose not to inform construction workers that the hereditary chiefs had ordered all workers to leave.As news of the raids spread, protests and transportation blockades sprung up throughout Canada. An Indigenous-led demonstration blocked a railway in Toronto for three hours Sunday, days after a highway in Caledonia, Ontario was blocked by protestors standing in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en land defenders.

    As of Monday evening, multiple people had been released from custody, including Sleydo”s husband, Cody Merriman, and photojournalists Amber Bracken and Michael Toledano.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Land defenders appear in court after police raids in Wet’suwet’en territory on Nov 23, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Green experts and human rights activists are concerned the hardline Cairo regime will suppress any civil society action

    Concern is growing over plans to host a UN climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh next year, in what will be a crucial summit if the world is to limit global heating to 1.5C.

    Several green experts and human rights activists have told the Observer they fear the ability of civil society groups to protest at the summit will be curtailed by Egypt’s authoritarian regime, reducing the pressure that can be brought to bear on leaders and ministers from the nearly 200 countries expected to take part.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Pakistan to Poland

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • It’s strange that a bill that would actually improve accountability in Victoria is being met by protests

    Australians have shown themselves ready to accept radical encroachments upon their civil liberties for the sake of public health. This is in one sense laudable but in another, disturbing. It is laudable in that it displays a community-mindedness where the end goal is the common good. People have been prepared to accept restrictions on their freedoms as long as the measures are reasonably necessary to protect them and their loved ones from disease and death. There has been a social compact – people are happy enough to accept restrictions, as long as they don’t outlast the crisis.

    We have seen serious erosions of human rights and freedoms in this nation before, yet these have not been wound back once the crisis had passed. And this has happened without so much as a whimper from the public. Before 9/11, Australia had no anti-terrorism laws. Post 9/11, our governments enacted 92 pieces of legislation with unheard-of measures turning age-old principles of criminal justice on their heads. No longer was the commission of a crime a prerequisite for being imprisoned. Instead, you could be imprisoned for something you might do in the future. All of these measures had sunset clauses but night has fallen on none of them.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – known as the policing bill – was already a vicious, repressive and racist piece of legislation. It sparked massive protests across the country, including the uprisings in Bristol that have led to 42 people facing serious charges.

    As The Canary reported in October, home secretary Priti Patel announced plans at the Conservative party conference to make the bill even worse. This included measures to increase the penalty for highway obstruction from a fine to up to six months imprisonment.

    Now amendments to the bill, currently in the House of Lords, have been published. And worryingly these amendments seem to go even further than the fascistic proposals Patel first announced. There are even provisions to ban internet use for some protesters.

    Want to protest? Go straight to jail

    While amendments to bills in the Lords can be ten a penny, these are from baroness Williams of Trafford. Williams is one of the sponsors of the bill and a Home Office minister – so these amendments are therefore likely to make it through to the legislation.

    The six months in jail for highway obstruction have been increased to 51 weeks. And there are also proposals for a new offence of “locking on” and “being equipped for locking on”. ‘Locking on’ is when protesters attach themselves to an object or each other to make it difficult for the police to move them. Again, this will be punishable by up to 51 weeks in prison. If this wasn’t bad enough, there are also proposals for a new stop and search power for anything to lock on with. Even more worryingly, there are provisions for this search power to be used without suspicion. This means the cops can just stop and search anyone they believe might be associated with a protest without needing a reasonable suspicion that they’ve done, or intend to do, anything illegal.

    Yet further powers, presumably aimed at people like the HS2 protesters who have dared to challenge the government’s building of an ecologically destructive and costly train line, criminalise anyone who obstructs “major transport works”. And again, dare to sit in front of bulldozer ripping down a tree for a new road, and you could face up to a 51 weeks in prison.

    I could have spent decades in prison for the crime of protesting

    I’m an activist as well as a journalist. As I’ve previously written, there are times when there’s a need to leave my press badge at home and take action. Over the last 25 years, amongst other things, I’ve obstructed countless roads, blocked trains carrying delegates to an arms fair, and locked on to various objects outside military bases. Altogether, if the policing bill had been enacted, I could have spent decades in prison for the crime of protesting.

    But where this legislation fails in its purpose is that it also wouldn’t have made a difference to the actions that I took and am prepared to take in the future. As I wrote after I was arrested at protests against the London arms fair when my child was six:

    What right do I have to say fuck you to those mothers? The mothers who have just seen their beautiful toddlers blown to pieces by a British made bomb. Do I say sorry love, but I’ve got a kid now, or do I extend my solidarity to mothers everywhere? Do I evaluate the risks I am taking as being petty compared to what other mothers face on a daily basis? Do I do everything I can to fight the companies and individuals who make money selling these bombs?

    I’ve always known I could be arrested and face jail time for the actions that I’ve taken. But although I’ve tried to avoid it, albeit unsuccessfully at times, the threat of prison hasn’t stopped me taking action. Because when you’re trying to stop the arms trade, or the climate crisis, for example, the risk of not taking action is too great. In other words, more people might get locked up, but it won’t stop people taking action. The threat of prison hasn’t, for example, stopped the Insulate Britain protesters imprisoned for breaching the injunction against them.

    Protest too much and the state can ban you using the internet

    One of the most worrying powers contained in the amendments are serious disruption prevention orders. These orders can be imposed against people who’ve been convicted of two or more protest-related offences that have caused “serious disruption” to “two or more individuals, or to an organisation”. For organisation, read corporation.

    Under these orders, a person can be required to report somewhere on particular days, presumably to a police station. They can also ban people from going to certain places, associating with named people, or taking part in particular events. They can also prohibit someone using the internet to “facilitate or encourage” someone to commit a “protest-related offence” or to “carry out activities related to a protest that result in, or are likely to result in, serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation”.

    Put simply, these orders will effectively ban people from organising protests – especially when the threshold of two or more people is so frighteningly low. The orders can last up to two years and, if breached, are punishable by up to 51 weeks in prison.

    Enough is enough!

    We cannot let these amendments go through without challenge. Kill the Bill groups across the country have done amazing work in focusing public attention on the initial bill. We now need to up the game and get people talking again. This is the biggest threat to our civil liberties in generations. It will give the state unprecedented power to lock up and control those who disagree with it. It’s a bill that was already a dictator’s wet dream even before these amendments were added.

    The Labour Party under Keir Starmer will not provide effective opposition. We cannot and should not rely on parliament to protect our rights. It’s down to all of us to show this bill is unworkable and to show that there’s massive public opposition to it being enacted. It’s down to all of us to show we will not be cowed; we will not back down and it will not stop us taking action.

    Our rights were won through disruptive protest. Important issues are highlighted through disruptive protest. Corporations are held to account through disruptive protest. It is part of the fabric of a free and democratic society.

    The time for action is now. If we delay, the harsh reality for many of us is that our political organising will take place behind prison bars. We cannot allow this to happen.

    Featured image via screengrab

    By Emily Apple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • When Chief Dsta’hyl arrived on a Saturday morning in October, the big construction vehicles rumbled back and forth over the cold mud. He watched an excavator dig into the soil, its yellow, hydraulic arm moving against the green backdrop of forests that he has called home all his life.

    The area that was being prepared for construction lies within the territory of the Wet’suwet’en, a First Nation in what is currently called British Columbia, Canada. As a supporting chief from the Likhts’amisyu clan, Dsta’hyl had been tasked with enforcing Wet’suwet’en law in the area.

    The scene he was witnessing — construction crews preparing to build a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory, without their consent — represented a blatant violation of those laws. And Dsta’hyl had seen enough. After warning the on-site construction managers that they were trespassing, he arrived the next day and approached a pair of orange-vested security subcontractors employed by TC Energy, the company building the fracked gas pipeline known as Coastal GasLink, or CGL. He notified them that he would be seizing one of their excavators and then stepped onto the hulking vehicle and disabled it by disconnecting its battery and other components. Though he planned to leave the vehicle in place, Dsta’hyl said he wanted to make a statement to the company, which the traditional leaders decided to evict from their territory last year.

    In a video posted on social media, one of the security workers asks Dsta’hyl what he wants from them. He lets out a hardy laugh.

    “For you guys to leave,” he says. 

    In another clip, Dsta’hyl stands on the vehicle as the workers below angle camcorders at him. “You guys are trespassing, and we want to make sure that you guys know that we mean business.”

    The crew members abandoned the area shortly after, driving off in their pickup trucks and construction vehicles — short one large piece of machinery. And while Dsta’hyl had gotten his message across, the asset-seizure was short-lived.

    “In the middle of the night, they stole that one back,” he said.

    Chief Dsta'hyl
    Chief Dsta’hyl disables a Coastal Gaslink bulldozer. Michael Toledano

    That incident was one of the latest standoffs between the Wet’suwet’en and Coastal GasLink over the proposed pipeline, which, if completed, would carry 2 billion cubic feet per day of fracked gas from northeastern B.C. to a proposed processing facility on the Pacific coast. Although the company says it received all necessary permits and approvals to build the pipeline, the hereditary chiefs of the five clans of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation contend that because they never gave the company permission to build on their territory, the construction efforts violate their laws — not to mention Canada’s own laws.

    The tribe organizes itself into five clans, each of which is subdivided into multiple “houses.” The house chiefs oversee specific areas within the tribe’s traditional territory, which encompasses roughly 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles). The hereditary chiefs make decisions that govern their territory.

    “It’s quite an intricate governance system,” Dsta’hyl said, adding that the Wet’suwet’en have been practicing these laws for thousands of years.

    The Wet’suwet’en government was recognized in a 1997 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada, which held that the First Nation had never given up rights or title to their lands. And, like other First Nations in Canada’s westernmost province, the Wet’suwet’en never signed a treaty with the British Crown nor the Canadian government, meaning their territory is unceded land.

    “They never surrendered or ceded their territory, so what they’re dealing with is this incursion by pipeline companies and police who are basically invading,” said Clifford Atleo (Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth)​​, an assistant professor of resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University whose work focuses on Indigenous governance.

    “What the Wet’suwet’en are doing is protecting their lands,” Atleo said.

    Using a Coastal GasLink excavator, land defenders seize a minivan to use as a blockade. Michael Toledano

    Fearing the destruction of their territory, as well as harmful impacts to water, wildlife and people, some members of the Wet’suwet’en have taken direct action against a slew of proposed pipelines over the past decade. They have created dozens of checkpoints and blockades to prevent construction crews from accessing Wet’suwet’en lands and significant sites. In 2009, members of the Unist’ot’en clan established a checkpoint near a small bridge that leads onto their territory, which they maintained alongside Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies for more than ten years. Another blockade was later built on the same road in the neighboring Gidimt’en territory, where, in January 2019, a series of police raids drew international media attention.

    Donning tactical gear and armed with military-style rifles, officers stormed the Gidimt’en checkpoint, arresting 14 land defenders as the officers dismantled the camp. Documents obtained by the Guardian suggest that the officers were prepared to use lethal force against Wet’suwet’en land defenders during the raid.

    A year later, the Unist’ot’en camp was raided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP. Several people were arrested in the 2020 raid, during which officers sawed through a wooden barricade with the word “RECONCILIATION” painted on it, clearing the way for CGL crews to build on Wet’suwet’en territory.

    Both incidents sparked renewed controversy regarding the tactics the RCMP employs in suppressing protests, with many critics highlighting the agency’s history of using excessive force against Indigenous land defenders as well as violent, anti-Indigenous sentiments among its ranks. The RCMP asserts that the raids and ongoing patrols in the area are necessary to enforce a court order that prohibits protestors from blocking CGL construction. A provincial court handed down the injunction three years ago, and, in the time since, both the RCMP and the company have used the legal ruling to restrict access to certain areas and to arrest land defenders who stand in the way of the project.

    But Indigenous people have continued to resist the pipeline, using tactics that escalated over the weekend, when members of the Gidimt’en clan demolished a section of road that CGL has used to access Wet’suwet’en territory.

    On Sunday morning, CGL employees and subcontractors were given an immediate evacuation order. “You have eight hours to vacate the territory peacefully,” said Sleydo’, a supporting chief from the Gidimt’en clan, who made the announcement over the radio. “Failure to comply will result in immediate road closure.”

    But land defenders saw little movement along the road — even after the company negotiated for a two-hour extension. When members of the group approached a man camp they had ordered to disband, they discovered construction crews were not preparing to leave, and had positioned multiple construction vehicles and machinery on the road, said Jennifer Wickham, a member of the Gidimt’en clan who serves as media coordinator for the group.

    In response, land defenders seized a CGL excavator and destroyed a segment of the roadway before dropping a crumpled minivan at a bridgehead. Wickham said that, given RCMP’s previous enforcement of injunctions, a police raid may be imminent.

    “We absolutely expect them to do that,” she said. “As far as when, we have no idea.”

    In an email, an RCMP spokesperson said the agency “is aware of the protest actions and we have, and will continue to have, a police presence in [the] area conducting roving patrols. No arrests were made and we continue to monitor the situation.”

    Sleydo’, a supporting chief from the Gidimt’en clan. Michael Toledano

    The hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en say the injunction, RCMP’s enforcement of it, and the project itself represent an affront to First Nations sovereignty, pointing to the 1997 Supreme Court decision as proof that they have the constitutional right to expel CGL from their territory.

    In what is known as the Delgamuukw case, the court confirmed that “Aboriginal title is a right to the land itself” based on occupation of the area and a system of law that predates British and Canadian colonization. The Supreme Court decision left many issues unresolved, though, such as the exact boundaries of the tribe’s traditional territories.

    Despite the house chiefs’ legally recognized authority, the pipeline company never engaged in meaningful consultation with them, Sleydo’ said.

    “They will send information, but they don’t actually give us the opportunity to engage with that information, and when we have responded, they disregard everything we say,” she said. “That’s not consultation and it’s definitely not consent.”

    The company frequently states that it received approval from the Wet’suwet’en because it negotiated an agreement with the tribe’s elected band councils. Imposed by the Canadian government under the Indian Act of 1876, the band-council system was created to facilitate interactions between First Nations and the federal government. The councils are considered the governing bodies for their respective First Nation reserves, and elected representatives from 20 band councils along the pipeline route signed so-called “benefit agreements” with the company to allow construction. Although councils from multiple reserves within Wet’suwet’en territory approved the project, the hereditary chiefs — as representatives of older, traditional styles of government — say they retain authority over their traditional lands, and that CGL needs their permission to access the territory.

    The company claims it has sought numerous meetings with the hereditary chiefs in the past two years, and that it continues to seek input from Wet’suwet’en leaders “with the sincere hope of developing a respectful and constructive relationship as we move to completion of the Project and beyond.” In an email, CGL spokesperson Natasha Westover cited safety concerns as justification for blocking Wet’suwet’en people from their territory.

    “Coastal GasLink has an obligation to facilitate access for [I]ndigenous peoples to their traditional territories, however, that access may be delayed where it is unsafe [to] provide access immediately,” she said. Westover declined to provide an interview with CGL executives or other personnel for this story, despite multiple requests.

    After CGL’s injunction was made permanent last winter the Wet’suwet’en house chiefs unanimously decided to evict the company from its territories.

    Protesters occupy Macmillan Yard
    Hundreds of protesters in Ontario march in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders after police raids drew international attention in February 2020. Rene Johnston / Toronto Star via Getty Images

    Flowing from a glacier-fed lake, Wedzin Kwa runs through the heart of Wet’suwet’en territory. The river provides important spawning grounds for salmon, and supplies community members with unpolluted drinking water. 

    “You could swim in that lake and just open your mouth and drink the water, it’s so pristine,” Sleydo’ said. “And the river is so clear that you can see these very deep spawning beds that the salmon have been returning to for thousands of years.”

    CGL plans to construct the pipeline beneath the river. In September, when members of the Gidimt’en clan heard that construction crews were preparing to tunnel under Wedzin Kwa, they rushed to occupy the site. They have since erected several structures, including a cabin with a full kitchen and multiple solar-powered “tiny homes.”

    Because the conflicts with RCMP in recent years have escalated in the dead of winter, the Gidim’ten clan has experience erecting blockades in temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and welcomed the chance to set up camp with only a light snow in the ground.

    “Blockade season came early this year,” Sleydo’ said.

    Despite the mounting tensions, Sleydo’ said the members of camp try to remain upbeat, laughing and telling stories around the campfire at night.

    But the mood changes when the RCMP approaches the area. In the days after the outpost was established, RCMP officers tasered a person and injured a man who had locked himself to the underside of a bus. Sleydo’ said officers grabbed the man by the legs and repeatedly lifted his body and slammed him onto the ground as a way of forcing him to unclip himself from the vehicle. She said the RCMP’s use of “pain compliance” equates to torture.

    “That person is still receiving ongoing medical care and has [nerve damage] in his hands,” she said.

    The national police force frequently sends members of a specialized division with a reputation of using excessive force against protestors. Known as the Community-Industry Response Group, or C-IRG, the roving unit draws RCMP officers from far-flung areas of Canada to break up protest camps that form in opposition to pipelines, mining projects and logging operations.

    Officers with the unit have been widely criticized in recent months for their aggressive tactics in breaking up anti-logging protests near Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island. In addition to making violent arrests and showering unarmed protestors with pepper spray, many of the officers removed all forms of identification from their uniforms during multiple raids. British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Douglas W. Thompson condemned those actions in his decision to end an injunction against the Fairy Creek protestors, writing that RCMP’s enforcement tactics “have led to serious and substantial infringement of civil liberties.”

    During RCMP raids on Wet’suwet’en territory, officers often brandish sniper rifles and bring in police dogs to intimidate land defenders, Sleydo’ said. “If we’re trying to defend a space, we’re considered a huge threat,” she said. “And they use that as an excuse to use violence and excessive force against us.”

    The agency’s media relations team did not provide a phone interview despite multiple requests.

    The Bulkley River runs through Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan territory. The river is partly fed by Wedzin Kwa, a vital waterway in Wet’suwet’en culture. Getty Images

    Miles Howe, an assistant professor of critical criminology at Brock University, said the RCMP often engages in “political policing,” in that the agency targets groups that are considered threats to Canada’s access to natural resources — and, by extension, the economic interests surrounding the extraction of those resources. Howe co-authored a 2019 report that used documents obtained through records requests to show that the RCMP performed extensive surveillance of Indigenous land defenders and assessed the risk posed by protestors not based on criminality, but on their ability to rally public support.

    The RCMP raids in early 2020 sparked nationwide protests in Canada, leading Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to voice tepid support for Wet’suwet’en sovereignty, though he later demanded that the “barricades come down.” Months later, federal and provincial government officials agreed to engage in land-rights negotiations with the hereditary chiefs.

    “So far, nothing has come from that process,” said Jennifer Wickham, who serves as media coordinator for the Gidimt’en resistance group.

    Instead, the Canadian government has subsidized Coastal GasLink and continues to tout the benefits of liquified natural gas as a “transition fuel” that will set Canada on a course to reach its ambitious climate goals. Earlier this month, Trudeau took the stage at the UN climate change conference in Scotland to outline Canada’s plan to cap oil and gas emissions in order to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

    “That’s no small task for a major oil and gas producing country,” he said.

    But critics say Trudeau’s commitments run counter to his administration’s support of natural gas projects, which have been shown to leak large amounts of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere. Given the outsize impacts climate change often has on Native communities, Indigenous rights advocates say it is critical that First Nations are adequately consulted on resource-extractive projects that take place on their ancestral lands.

    In 2014, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples implored the Canadian government to seek the “free, prior and informed consent” of First Nations in the early stages of a project. The U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that Natives “have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership” and that they “shall not be forcibly removed from their territories.” Earlier this year, legislators passed a bill aimed at implementing UNDRIP into Canadian law.

    And yet, the government is enabling Coastal GasLink to push its pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory.

    Sleydo’ said the group is “digging in for winter,” and has no intention of allowing the pipeline to cross Wedzin Kwa. The mother of three children said that, although it has been difficult being away from her family during the occupation, she refuses to pass the pipeline’s impacts down to her children.

    “They will not drill under our sacred headwaters because we’re going to defend this space until the end,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Canada sides with a pipeline, violating Wet’suwet’en laws — and its own on Nov 18, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A grassroots NHS campaign group will be taking the fight for fair pay and safe staffing right to the heart of Westminster. And, it will be sailing the Thames to raise the alarm over the Tories’ wilful destruction of our health service.

    NHS workers saying ‘enough is enough’

    NHS Workers Say No is a grassroots campaign group:

    It’s been at the forefront of action against the Tory-created NHS crisis this year: from protests outside parliament to huge petitions via campaigning videos. NHS Workers Say No has been unrepentant in its fight for a safe NHS that pays it staff properly and works for everyone. Now, its taking action via the River Thames in London.

    “Sink or swim”

    The group has organised a protest and rally on Friday 26 November with the Thames as its focal point:

    The group said on its Facebook event page:

    AHOY there!

    NHS workers are taking to the river Thames on the 26th of November at 12.30 to show this government that we outright reject the 3% pay offer.

    Frontline NHS workers have hired a boat to take us as close to the house of commons as possible. We will be making our voices heard using our on board PA system, megaphones, and using banners/placards.

    Then, there’ll be a protest and banner drop on Westminster bridge. Finally, NHS Workers Say No and its supporters will march to Old Palace Yard, opposite Parliament, for a rally. Guest speakers will address the crowds. You can get involved online. On the day, use the #NHSSOS #NHSPay15 hashtags on Twitter.

    Given the year the NHS has had, it’s little wonder NHS Workers Say No feel the need to protest.

    Running the NHS into the ground

    The dire government pay rise of 3% for NHS staff has caused anger among workers and unions. Waiting lists are at record highs. And some of the corporate media are actively briefing against our NHS workers.

    Meanwhile, the Tories are pushing their health and care bill through parliament. Campaign groups like Keep Our NHS Public have been saying it will lead to further privatisation. You can join a protest about the bill at 5pm at Parliament on Monday 22 November.

    But crucially, winter is coming. A&E and paramedics are already struggling under the strain due to the lack of beds:

    With nearly 100,000 staff vacancies in England alone, the combined pressure of both coronavirus and flu cases – and, crucially, NHS workers’ wellbeing hitting rock bottom – the Tories have created a perfect storm for the health service. Now, already-exhausted frontline staff are having to fight back. So, it’s up to all of us to support them.

    Featured image via Tom Arthur – Wikimedia and Good Morning Britain – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Activists from around the world have taken to the stage at COP26 for a “People’s Plenary” session.

    The COP26 Coalition organised the event on Friday, with one of the UN climate conference’s halls filled with hundreds of representatives from civil society groups.

    The People’s COP26 Decision for Climate Justice

    The COP26 Coalition has released its declaration for climate justice. It states that:

    Climate change already impacts and threatens billions of lives, with billions more on the line: it is those that have done the least to cause climate change that are most impacted, especially women, Black, Indigenous Peoples, and people of colour, peasants and rural people, youth, people with disabilities, local communities and frontline communities.

    The climate crisis also amplifies the structural inequalities and injustices that have been hardwired into our economic and political systems that have resulted in a spiralling debt crisis, Covid vaccine apartheid and growing inequality and poverty.

    It asserts that:

    People are tired of waiting for governments to prioritize people and the planet over profits while so many lives are being impacted and lost. We are out of time and out of patience.

    And it has produced a list of ten demands that includes “Global North countries pay[ing] their climate debt” and excluding big polluters from the process.

    It concludes by stating:

    The time for words without action has come and gone. We no longer have the luxury of time to sit back and allow governments and private interests to destroy our future. Scientific predictions are increasingly dire; it is not hyperbolic to assert that the very future of humanity depends on the outcomes of these negotiations. Governments must immediately heed the growing demands of those already facing crisis and those who will face crisis and bravely reimagine our world in a way that guarantees everyone the right to live with dignity and in harmony with our planet.

    The Era of Injustice is over!

     Protests continue

    A number of protests are due to take place on the final scheduled day of COP26, though the summit is expected to overrun into the weekend.

    The activists at the People’s Plenary are due to march from within the blue zone to meet other groups, who are gathering outside.

    A rally is expected to take place in Finnieston Street outside the venue in the afternoon.

    One of those speaking at the People’s Plenary was Ta’Kaiya Blaney, an indigenous activist from Canada.

    She said:

    Myself and others have been criminalised by our government.

    I watched (prime minister) Justin Trudeau pose for pictures with indigenous land defenders, meanwhile land defenders are taken as political prisoners back home.

    Mary Church, of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said the meeting was to express “deep frustration” with the climate summit.

    She continued:

    We are hurtling ever closer to reaching the critical 1.5C threshold.

    Climate change already impacts and threatens billions of lives.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • On 9 November, students from the London School of Economics (LSE) protested a debate hosting Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom Tzipi Hotovely on campus. As British Jews Against Occupation have set out, Hotovely has an “appalling record of racist and inflammatory behaviour”. In spite of this, the university – as well as Tory and Labour politicians – rushed to denounce the peaceful protest. Police have launched an investigation.

    People took to Twitter to highlight the hypocrisy of those defending Hotovely’s right to free speech while denouncing the actions of peaceful pro-Palestinian protestors.

    Platforming a vocal fascist

    Ahead of an LSE Students’ Union Debate Society event hosting Hotovely, LSE for Palestine shared plans to protest the platforming of the reported anti-Palestinian racist and Islamophobe. The student group planned a peaceful protest to take place outside the event in a display of solidarity with Palestine, and an attempt to disrupt and discredit the Israeli ambassador’s fascist ideology.

    Hotovely is an ambassador of the apartheid Israeli state. She has a track record of spreading Israeli settler colonialism propaganda, Islamophobic rhetoric, and anti-Palestinian racist hate. She has described the Nakba – the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Israeli state – as an “Arab lie”. Hotovely also called for further Israeli occupation of Palestine through annexation. And she has denied the very existence of Palestinian people. Protesters also highlighted that she has espoused Islamophobic rhetoric, and is openly against relationships between Jewish and Arab people.

    Ahead of the debate, the LSE Students’ Union Palestine Society shared a statement reading:

    There is no room for such bigoted and racist rhetoric on our LSE campus. There is no room for the denial of Palestinian existence on our LSE campus. There is no room for colonial apologism on our LSE campus.

    A peaceful student protest

    While protesters chanted outside the building in which the debate was taking place, Hotovely retained her platform for the duration of the event. During that time, she denied the Nakba again. The only disruption inside the building was a group of students walking out in protest.

    Student protestors booed as Hotovely left the building. In video footage, one protester can be heard asking “aren’t you ashamed” while security bundles the ambassador into a car. It appears that the protest was disruptive, raucous and passionate, but never violent. However, police allegedly assaulted students on their own university campus.

    Maintaining that “Palestinian human rights are not up for debate”, LSE for Palestine posted:

    Speaking out in support of student protestors, Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal tweeted:

    However, LSE published a statement insinuating protestors engaged in “intimidation and threats of violence”. The university stated that it is prepared to take action against student protesters.

    One Twitter user responded with:

    Fascists supporting fascists

    In the wake of the protest, Hotovely soon garnered the support of right wing UK government officials. Home secretary Priti Patel posted a tweet saying that she was “disgusted” by the peaceful protest. And Middle East minister James Cleverly characterised protesters as “aggressive and threatening“.

    Netpol responded to the home secretary’s support for the police investigation into the peaceful protest with:

    Reminding us where Patel stands on Palestinians’ right to live free from Israeli settler-colonialism, rapper Lowkey tweeted:

    Labour’s Israel apologists chip in

    Soon, even Labour MPs spoke out against the peaceful student protest. Leader of the opposition Keir Starmer and shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy called the protest “unacceptable“. People were quick to call out the absurdity of members of the opposition vehemently supporting an out and proud fascist.

    Responding to Starmer’s denouncement of student protesters, writer, journalist and broadcaster Aaron Bastani tweeted:

    Labour councillor Aydin Dikerdem said:

    And campaign group Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Socialists shared:

     

    Solidarity with student protesters

    In spite of backlash from LSE, the government and the mainstream media, many have spoken out in defence of the student protesters. Pro-Palestinian student societies from the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) and King’s College London (KCL) spoke out in solidarity with LSE protesters, setting out that proponents of apartheid are not welcome on their campuses either.

    Moved by this display of inter-institution solidarity, City, University of London Students’ Union president Shaima Dallali tweeted:

    Journalist Robert Carter, who reported from the protest, shared:

    Al Jazeera producer Linah Alsaafin shared:

    Free speech for whom?

    Speaking to the suppression of marginalised voices in the name of ‘free speech’, Ana Oppenheim shared:

    Responding to LSE for Palestine’s statement defending the protest, Palestinian writer and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd said:

    Urging people to speak up in defence of Palestine, assistant professor at LSE Sara Salem tweeted: 

    And co-director of LSE’s centre for human rights Ayça Çubukçu said:

    Bringing attention back to the violent reality of Israeli occupation, one Twitter user shared:

    Arguments denouncing the peaceful student protest while crying wolf about the Israeli ambassador’s right to free speech beg the questions: ‘free from what?’ and ‘free for whom?’. Palestinians’ right to live free from Israeli occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing should certainly never be up for debate. The state and its institutions may be coming after student protesters, but the protesters stand firmly on the right side of history.

    Featured image via Ömer Yıldız/Unsplash

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • RNZ News

    An iwi that pastor Brian Tamaki descends from are calling him out to say he is putting Māori communities at risk.

    This follows mass protests across the country on Tuesday organised by a “freedom” group set up by Tamaki opposing vaccines and lockdown restrictions.

    Te Rūnanganui o Ngāti Hikairo located between Kāwhia and Te Awamutu were especially concerned with the number of young tamariki involved in the rallies.

    They said Tāmaki, who was one of their own, was asking Māori communities to undermine science, putting their people at risk.

    They have now called on the Destiny Church leader to take a whānau-first approach.

    Rūnanga chair Susan Turner said because Tamaki was a descendant of their rūnanga it was important to show leadership and encourage the right messaging and approach to combatting covid 19.

    She said Tamaki needed to promote scientific advice among whānau, iwi and the wider community to protect each other against the virus.

    ‘Share the right messages’
    “Brian as a member of Ngāti Hikairo, we wanted to encourage him to share the right messages and dispel the rhetoric that he and his followers are saying to our people.

    “We want them to follow science and go with the right advice and for our people to be united in this fight against covid,” she said.

    The inclusion of mixed messaging related to freedom and self-determination was particularly concerning.

    It comes as the rūnanga battles to prevent an outbreak amongst Ngāti Hikairoa whānau.

    Turner said it did not reflect a mātauranga Māori approach as tino rangatiratanga should be represented by a collective effort to protect whānau and those most vulnerable.

    The current approach from Tamaki was promoting a colonial approach to preserving life and liberty, she said.

    “The biggest concern that we’ve got is the fact that they’re giving our people the wrong information.

    Tamaki message ‘opposing tikanga’
    “Those sentiments simply oppose the whole concept of what we believe is our tikanga which is about protecting ourselves, protecting our whānau and the people that live in our community.

    “It’s clear to us that this virus is going to spread, and we need to do all we can to protect our whānau, our rangatahi and our tamariki,” she said.

    The rūnanga strongly supported vaccines and said Tamaki carried a Ngāti Hikairo name, and with that came obligations to use his platform to strengthen Māori communities by encouraging whānau to get vaccinated and comply with health restrictions.

    A spokesperson for Tamaki rejected RNZ’s request for an interview but said they wished to speak to Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Hikairo face-to-face about the issues at hand.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • For two months now, the animosity between right-wing activists and left-wing antifascists, which regularly leads to violence at street protests, has played out in a setting where physical combat is not allowed: the Los Angeles Superior Court in Torrance, California.

    The legal battle began on September 3 when Adam Kiefer, a far-right activist, obtained a temporary restraining order against Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher who tweeted evidence that Kiefer was at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., during the January 6 riot.

    Kiefer, 28, is a trucker from Riverside County, California, who has become a fixture at Proud Boys rallies and thrown punches at far-right protests against vaccine mandates and Black Lives Matter. Loder, 45, is a tech company founder and cybersecurity expert from Los Angeles who posts meticulous, open-source investigations of local right-wing extremists on a Twitter feed with more than 100,000 followers.

    La-Mesa-Rally

    Adam Kiefer, right, raised his fists to fight when he and other right-wing activists disrupted a Black Lives Matter protest in San Diego on Aug. 1, 2020.

    Photo: Chris Stone/Times of San Diego

    Loder has gathered evidence of Kiefer’s bellicose presence at these public events for more than a year. But on September 2, Loder seemed to strike a nerve by tweeting a detailed thread of visual evidence, gleaned by antifascist researchers from right-wing social media accounts, that appeared to show Kiefer among the rioters at the Capitol in January.

    Screen-Shot-2021-10-28-at-7.51.03-PM

    A screenshot of a tweet from Chad Loder, drawing attention to visual evidence compiled by an antifascist research collective that appeared to show Adam Kiefer at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

    Photo: Chad Loder via Twitter

    The next day, Kiefer asked for a temporary restraining order against Loder, claiming that Loder’s tweets about him — which document Kiefer’s behavior at public events — were a form of harassment akin to stalking. The family court commissioner who evaluated the application approved it, pending a hearing before a judge four weeks later, and issued an unusually broad order that barred Loder from even tweeting about Kiefer in the meantime.

    Kiefer’s success immediately inspired two other far-right activists to ask the court for similar orders against Loder, who responded by filing a counterclaim that accuses Kiefer and his allies of abusing the legal system to shut down a kind of citizen journalism that is protected by the First Amendment.

    Loder, who is nonbinary, told me in an interview last month that their tech career has given them the resources to hire lawyers to launch a multipronged legal counteroffensive, unlike Kiefer who is representing himself. Loder immediately defied the part of the court order that barred them from tweeting about Kiefer. “I just told my attorney, I refuse,” Loder said. “I have a First Amendment right to continue to do my reporting and to tweet about my case.”

    After Kiefer reported Loder to the police six times in September for continuing to tweet about him, a local prosecutor filed contempt charges that could have sent Loder to jail for defying the restraining order.

    To understand why the people Loder reports on might be anxious to stop this research from being published, it helps to know that Loder’s expert use of publicly available images to identify and track right-wing extremists has already had legal consequences for some of Kiefer’s allies.

    In July, Loder helped identify far-right activist Aaron Simmons as the masked attacker who clubbed an independent filmmaker in the head during an anti-trans protest in Los Angeles. (That attack had been wrongly blamed on antifascists after video of the assault was tweeted with a misleading caption by Andy Ngo, a far-right commentator.) Simmons was subsequently arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon for the attack on the filmmaker (Simmons had menaced Loder outside the Torrence courthouse in September).

    On August 26, when another Southern California right-winger, David Dempsey, was arrested by the FBI for attacking federal officers during the Capitol breach, the criminal complaint prominently cited Loder’s online detective work. In March, Loder had published a forensic visual investigation, detailed in an 18-tweet thread, identifying Dempsey as the Capitol rioter known to online researchers as #FlagGaiterCopHater because he had worn an American flag gaiter over his face.


    Kiefer told me in an Instagram chat that he did not riot at the Capitol on January 6 and was not there with Dempsey, but the two men have been side by side at other right-wing rallies. Kiefer posted a photograph and video on Instagram of Dempsey at his side during protests, and photojournalists captured the men together twice last year: confronting Black Lives Matter activists in San Diego in August, and marching with the Proud Boys at a pro-Trump protest in Washington, D.C, in December.

    WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 12: Members of the Proud Boys march towards Freedom Plaza during a protest on December 12, 2020 in Washington, DC. Thousands of protesters who refuse to accept that President-elect Joe Biden won the election are rallying ahead of the electoral college vote to make Trump's 306-to-232 loss official. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

    Far-right Proud Boys marched during a pro-Trump protest in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 2020. Antifascist researchers say Adam Kiefer is the man in white-rimmed reflective sunglasses near the front on the left. Kiefer confirmed to The Intercept that he did march with the Proud Boys that day, wearing a Proud Boys hoodie.

    Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

    Kiefer also insisted that he is not an extremist and is “not part of the Proud Boys organization,” although he admitted that he did wear a Proud Boys hoodie in the middle of that Proud Boys march in Washington three weeks before the attack on the Capitol.

    Kiefer called the Proud Boys “a men’s drinking club” and said it would be rude to not wear the sweatshirt while hanging out with its members.

    When confronted with the fact that he also wore that Proud Boys hoodie last month at a Proud Boys rally in Los Angeles — and his current Instagram profile image shows him wearing it while posing with a Proud Boys leader, Tiny Toese — Kiefer called the group “a men’s drinking club” and said it would be rude to not wear the sweatshirt while hanging out with its members.

    Loder, who has been studying images of far-right events for five years, has tweeted multiple examples of Kiefer in Proud Boys regalia, including video of him in Washington in December.

    Kiefer has also documented his own violence against left-wing protesters, using a video camera strapped to his chest, on his @americanpoliticalbeefz Instagram account, which has thousands of followers. At one of those events, he wore a T-shirt with his Instagram handle printed below the slogan “Kill All Pedos.”

    Loder first became alarmed while working as a consultant for tech companies that wanted to keep their sites clear of hate speech and messages that promote violence; they realized that social media platforms were not doing enough to keep extremists “from fundraising and recruiting and spreading their hateful messages.” Paying attention to what was on those platforms during Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, and in the lead-up to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Loder said, felt like “pointing at an oncoming freight train, and then just watching it happen.”

    So, working on weekends, Loder started to tackle the problem as a volunteer, watching hours of footage from right-wing social media feeds and trying to identify groups that might be using political rallies as “grass to hide in, to recruit and carry out violent acts.”

    Loder has tried to prod social networks into taking action against users who threaten violence. In 2019, Loder set up searches to collect death threats directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar, after then-President Donald Trump tweeted a video that distorted her comments on the 9/11 attacks alongside images of the World Trade Center in flames. Loder then urged other users to mass-report those tweets to press Twitter to enforce its rules and remove them.

    California makes it easy to obtain temporary restraining orders, which only stay in effect until a hearing before a judge, in order to protect potential victims of domestic abuse or stalking from violence. Kiefer might have triggered those concerns by claiming in his application that Loder had “posted my address online” and threatened “to have me killed.” Loder denies having ever threatened Kiefer or shared his address, and Kiefer got the restraining order without presenting any evidence to support those claims.

    “I didn’t even know his home address,” Loder told me. “I would never put someone’s address out there.”

    “Do I identify people based off of their public activities? Yes, that’s what I do,” Loder added. “Is that doxxing? I don’t really think so. I mean, not in the sense that these people use it, which is like, ‘Oh, he identified me as someone who attacked someone in public, so I’m going to post his fucking home address, and his kid’s address.’ Like OK, no, that’s really out of bounds as far as I’m concerned.”

    A piece of evidence Kiefer brought to a hearing last month suggests that he is operating under the assumption that any information about where he lives that appears on Twitter must have been secretly orchestrated by Loder. Outside the courthouse in Torrance, Kiefer held up a printout of a tweet that showed what he said was his truck outside his former home. Kiefer then accused a journalist who reports on the far right, Kelly Stuart, of having traveled to that location to take the photograph of his truck and post it on Twitter. Stuart denied that and pointed out that she had just retweeted the image, which was posted on an anonymous Twitter account three weeks after Kiefer had obtained the restraining order against Loder.

    In fact, that image was taken in February 2021 by a Google Street View camera as it drove past a house that is different from the home address Kiefer had provided to the court.

    There is, however, evidence that Loder has been doxxed. Loder told me that, just before Kiefer obtained the restraining order, they received threatening text messages. Loder allowed me to review the texts and they included records showing Loder’s address, the name of Loder’s ex-wife, a threatening remark about their young child, and the warning that this information was “being sent to every Patriot in the country.”

    After the texts, Loder said, “My apartment got plastered with all of these flyers … saying that I’m a white supremacist and I’m attacking a gay Asian man online — that’s Andy Ngo, of course.” According to Loder, Proud Boys “bragged about having done this” in a Telegram chat monitored by antifascists. “What they’re doing by showing up at my house at night is saying, ‘We know where you live, we can get to you, we can get to your family,’” Loder told me.

    When Kiefer first obtained the temporary restraining order, it was greeted as a triumph by his allies on the far-right — including Ngo, who tweeted video of the order being served on Loder by Sarah Mason, another far-right activist Loder has tracked.

    In a follow-up tweet, Ngo informed his 900,000 followers that Loder had been required, because of the temporary restraining order, to surrender their gun to the police until the case is settled. Loder told me that Ngo’s tweet, which named the area they live in and showed the inside of their apartment, had triggered threats, including from a retired LAPD homicide detective who tweeted to Ngo: “I’m going to see Chad one day. I’ll take photos of the aftermath.” (The former detective, Sal LaBarbera, told me that he did not mean to threaten Loder with violence.)

    Then the copycat requests for more restraining orders against Loder were filed by two far-right activists Loder has tracked, Bryna Makowka and Lucas Isturiz. In late January, Loder had reported that Makowka — who was also at the Capitol on January 6 — played a leading role in an anti-vaccine protest that led to the temporary shutdown of a mass vaccination clinic at Dodger Stadium. In April, Loder had identified Isturiz as the right-wing activist who was captured on video destroying a memorial in Hollywood for Daunte Wright and threatening Black Lives Matter activists.

    Both Makowka and Isturiz had their initial requests for temporary restraining orders against Loder denied, although they were automatically granted subsequent hearings before a judge.

    “These people are just thrilled that they can cause me to get dragged to a court … and they get to stick a camera in my face and shout stuff at me and it’s a spectacle, and then Andy posts it,” Loder told me, referring to video of Loder being heckled by right-wing livestreamers outside the courthouse shared on Twitter by Andy Ngo. “But they’re actually getting crushed, legally,” Loder added.

    From the start of the legal battle, Loder knew something important about California law that Kiefer apparently did not. The state has a statute designed to punish anyone who abuses the legal system by filing meritless lawsuits, including false harassment claims intended to deter or silence the protected speech of their critics. In legal jargon, such a scheme is known as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or a SLAPP.

    Last month, Loder’s legal team invoked this law and filed what is known as an anti-SLAPP motion, asking the judge overseeing Kiefer’s case to rule that his request for a restraining order was an abuse of the legal system designed to silence Loder. If Loder’s motion is successful, it could cost Kiefer tens of thousands of dollars. That’s because, if the judge agrees that Kiefer’s request for the temporary restraining order was a SLAPP, the court would not only lift the order but also impose a financial penalty by requiring Kiefer to pay Loder’s legal fees.

    Kiefer filed a two-sentence response to the court, which was based not on any legal analysis but on an Andy Ngo tweet, in which the far-right pundit noted that Loder had tweeted in early 2020: “I am not a journalist. I’m an activist.”

    Kiefer submitted a screenshot of Loder’s tweet as an exhibit, telling the court: “Loder states that he is not a journalist but an activist. There fore [sic] ‘slapp law’ doesn’t count.”

    Unfortunately for Kiefer, that is not how the law works. Thomas Burke, a lawyer who wrote a book on California’s anti-SLAPP statute, told me that it doesn’t matter at all if Loder is defined as an activist or a journalist. The law is designed to protect anyone whose free speech in a public forum or on a matter of public interest is threatened by a meritless lawsuit or injunction.

    In fact, the statute was first crafted in 1992 to protect activism, not journalism. The original impetus, as the text of the law states, was to address “a disturbing increase in lawsuits brought primarily to chill the valid exercise of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and petition for the redress of grievances.” The legislature added, “it is in the public interest to encourage continued participation in matters of public significance, and that this participation should not be chilled through abuse of the judicial process.”

    As Burke explained, the original aim was to stop wealthy corporations from suing environmentalists or residents of an area who protested a company’s use of land but could not afford the legal fees to defend themselves from a libel suit. A later amendment added language saying that the statute “shall be construed broadly.” Since then, courts have ruled that anti-SLAPP protections apply to people who are providing information to the public, whether they are activists or journalists.

    Since Loder’s use of publicly available information to track extremists is related to a public interest, Burke said, it should clear the bar for the type of speech the statute protects from prior restraint.

    At a hearing on October 22, Loder’s lawyer John Hamasaki convinced the judge to strike the part of the temporary order that had banned Loder from tweeting about Kiefer. A week later, the prosecutor who had filed contempt charges against Loder for violating the ban while it was in effect dropped the case.

    Loder has also fended off the two other requests for restraining orders. After learning that she could end up being saddled with paying Loder’s legal fees if she proceeded and lost on anti-SLAPP grounds, Makowka decided to drop her request. Isturiz’s case was dismissed because he arrived late to the courthouse and missed his hearing. Isturiz was informed later that he could refile, but told a reporter that he would not.

    A ruling on the anti-SLAPP motion against Kiefer is expected to come in early January.

    In the meantime, Loder has also repulsed two recent legal complaints from lawyers working for Andy Ngo. The first was a copyright complaint over a photograph Loder tweeted of Ngo posing in front of fascist graffiti in Poland. The second was a cease-and-desist letter concerning Loder’s role in a Twitter campaign to shame companies into pulling their ads from the Canadian website Ngo writes for, The Post Millennial.

    Loder scoffs at Ngo’s complaint that putting pressure on the site’s advertisers is a form of censorship. “I’m not censoring you,” Loder said they would tell Ngo. “But I am showing advertisers what your site looks like and what’s on there, and they’re dropping you.”

    “To me, it’s frustrating and it’s time-consuming and it has interfered with my reporting, but it’s also an indication to me that I’m getting to them,” Loder told me of the legal complaints. “The people who cry about cancel culture and free speech,” Loder added, seem untroubled by the idea of reporting an activist to the police for tweeting.

    When I asked Kiefer if he was sorry he ever asked the court for help in his dispute with Loder, he replied, “No. Why would I be?” I pointed out that the temporary restraining order no longer keeps Loder from tweeting about him, and he could end up paying Loder’s legal fees. Kiefer told me he is sure he will prevail in January when the court is expected to rule on the anti-SLAPP motion.

    The post A Right-Wing Brawler Asked a Court to Protect Him From an Antifascist’s Tweets appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • RNZ News

    New Zealand’s Parliament was on high security today as thousands marched through the capital Wellington for an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protest.

    Thousands of people gathered at Civic Square for an anti-lockdown and anti vaccination protest this morning.

    The group intended to march to Parliament for what they are describing as a “freedom protest”.

    Significant disruptions to the bus services in the capital were expected as buses detoured away from the central business distruct (CBD) to avoid the protest.

    Protester ‘bites’ police officer
    Meanwhile in Auckland, a police officer was bitten by a protester at the northern boundary as a group blocked traffic for more than an hour.

    About 50 protesters arrived from the northern side of the boundary on State Highway 1 at Te Hana.

    Traffic in both directions was brought to a halt by the group and some of their vehicles.

    Police said they attempted to engage with the group and a number of vehicles were towed in order to clear the roadway.

    Officers physically intervened to move protesters off the road and in the process one was bitten by an “as yet unidentified protester”, police said.

    “Actions like this are totally avoidable and poses unnecessary risk to our staff who are simply trying do their part in preventing the spread of covid-19,” Waitematā District Commander Superintendent Naila Hassan said in a statement.

    Protesters have dispersed and police will keep monitoring the site.

    Protest ‘interferes with vaccination efforts’
    Te Rūnanga ō Ngāti Whātua uri and chief operating officer Antony Thompson said trucks carrying food and medical supplies were being held up unnecessarily, “creating major risks to our communities and whānau of the North”.

    He said thoughtless moves like this put whānau in danger and urged members of these groups to think about the impact they were having on those they believed they were trying to protect.

    Thompson said protesters were using this as an opportunity to “grandstand their issue”.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • An estimated 100,000 protesters took to the streets in Glasgow, Scotland, this weekend to demand that world leaders meeting for a two-week-long United Nations climate change conference take stronger action to curb the global crisis. The first week of the conference was filled with flashy announcements about private investment in climate solutions and cooperative pledges to phase out coal, halt deforestation, and cut methane emissions. But plans from individual countries are still not enough to stave off the disastrous effects of climate change that could occur if the world heats more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.)

    The protests ramped up over the course of last week, with climate activists young and old marching, staging performance art–like stunts, and generally keeping the pressure on world leaders to cut down on cheap talk and commit to real action to stabilize the climate. 

    On Monday, Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg marched with her Fridays for Future organization in a park near the COP26 conference center. “Inside COP there are just politicians and people in power pretending to take our future seriously, pretending to take the present seriously of the people who are being affected already today by the climate crisis,” she said in a speech. “Change is not going to come from inside there. That is not leadership — this is leadership.”

    Greta Thunberg gives a speech among a crowd in Glasgow
    Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images

    Thunberg, along with Vanessa Nakate, Dominika Lasota, and Mitzi Tan — three other leading youth climate activists from around the world — also put out a letter Monday demanding that COP26 negotiators keep the promise of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) alive and end fossil fuel investments. It had 1.8 million signatures as of Monday, with the numbers ticking up by the second.

    On Tuesday, the sardonic side of the climate movement came out, with protesters donning masks with the faces of world leaders and engaging in a fake fight over an inflatable globe. Others stood behind them wearing costumes meant to look like the violent guards from the Netflix show Squid Game and held a banner that read “World Leaders: Stop Playing Climate Games.”

    Activists in costume as world leaders hold a beach ball globe
    Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images
    Activist dressed as Joe Biden breakdances in front of a line of protesters
    Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images

    Meanwhile, Extinction Rebellion led hundreds in a march on the JP Morgan Chase building in Glasgow to protest the bank’s investment in fossil fuel projects, and a group called Ocean Rebellion staged a demonstration outside an oil refinery in the city, with some activists donning black robes and ghostly white faces, to demand near-term action on climate.

    Protestors outside of the JP Morgan Chase building in glasgow. A sign reads "the world's largest financier of fossil fuels."
    ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP via Getty Images
    An activist in a black cape with arms outstretched like a bat stands in front of an oil refinery
    Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images

    On Wednesday, protests continued, with marches in the streets, and a group of Extinction Rebellion members dressing in aprons and advertising their “greenwashing services.” Wednesday was “Finance Day” at the conference, and many protests targeted the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which had announced that it had members with $130 trillion in assets pledging to fund climate action.

    Protesters dressed in aprons and cleaning gloves holding buckets with signs that say greenwash services
    Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images
    Protesters at night with signs that say "fossil fuels equal no futre" and "GFANZ is a green wash" and "keep 1.5 degrees alive" and "real zero not net zero"
    BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images
    A large mass of protesters in the streets of Glasgow with extinction rebellion flags
    Peter Summers/Getty Images

    On Thursday, U.S. protesters met the arrival of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland at COP26 with a message: Keep your promise to end fossil fuel leasing on public land and waters. The Biden administration is currently planning oil and gas lease sales across 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico and hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands.

    Protesters in Glasgow holding a banner that says no new federal fossil fuels
    Ethan Buckner / Center for Biological Diversity

    Activists dressed as Pikachus marched throughout the city, demanding that the Japanese government stop financing coal projects overseas and phase out coal within the country by 2030. Neither Japan nor the United States signed on to a pledge by 46 countries to phase out coal power on Thursday.

    Protesters in inflatable pikachu costumes march holding signs that say "Japan, stop funding coal"
    Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images

    Friday was technically “Youth and Public Empowerment Day,” and the crowd of people marching through the streets swelled to approximately 25,000. After marching just over a mile to a stage set up in a city square, several leading activists gave speeches. Indigenous youth from the Brazilian Amazon spoke about the destruction of local ecosystems and the murder of indigenous land defenders.

    “Indigenous people are dying in the river; they’re being washed away by massive floods,” one speaker said. “Houses are being washed away, schools full of children inside, bridges, our food, our crops, everything is being washed away.”

    Youth activists from indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon give speeches on a stage during a protest
    ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP via Getty Images
    A huge mass of protesters and signs on the streets of Glasgow on Friday
    Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

    Thunberg dismissed any progress conference organizers had announced throughout the week. “This is now a Global North greenwash festival,” she said. “A two-week-long celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.” 

    But Nakate, a Ugandan activist, urged the crowd to keep fighting. “We cannot give up now. We need to continue holding leaders accountable for their actions. We cannot keep quiet about climate injustice,” she said.

    On Saturday, tens of thousands more people joined the fray in the cold and the rain in a march for climate justice.

    a wall of protesters fill a city street in Glasgow
    Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images
    two women stand in protest. one woman has a black lives matter shirt on and the other is carrying a sign that says indigenous rights equal climate justice.
    ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP via Getty Images

    Twenty-one scientists from a group called Scientist Rebellion were arrested after chaining themselves to a bridge in the city center. The protesters gave speeches debunking what they called myths coming out of the conference, like the idea that “planting a trillion trees will save us.”

    COP26 will continue through Friday.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Photos of the furious, sardonic protests surrounding COP26 on Nov 8, 2021.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Pontecorvo.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Youth climate protesters have defied the education secreatry’s plea to demonstrate at the weekend rather than in school time.

    Nadhim Zahawi urged young people not to miss school to protest about climate policies.

    His plea came as youth activists are taking to the streets of Glasgow to demand action on climate change from leaders as the COP26 talks continue.

    Campaigner Greta Thunberg, fellow activist Vanessa Nakate are among the young campaigners will speak to crowds at the end of the march through the city.

    Asked on Times Radio whether he had been invited to join the marches, Zahawi said:

    No… I have to say, I wish they were doing it on a Saturday and a Sunday, not in school time.

    Young people are taking action

    Young people, however, are defying Zahawi:

    Charlie O’Rourke, 14, from Glasgow, skipped school to attend the march.

    He said global leaders at COP26 must “listen to the people”.

    He told the PA news agency:

    Listen to what they want to say. Don’t just go for profit. Listen to what the planet needs.”

    Finlay Pringle, 14, from Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands, travelled by train to Glasgow with his father to take part in the march.

    He said:

    If you really, truly love something and you want to protect it, no matter what it is, it doesn’t have to be climate striking, but if there’s something that you love and you want to protect it, then you should do that, don’t think twice about it.

    Cop26 – Glasgow
    Demonstrators gathered in Kelvingrove Park in the west end of Glasgow for the Fridays for Future Scotland march (Andrew Milligan/PA)

    People of all ages have joined the youth-focused protest.

    Among them are a group of mothers from around the world, including Rosamund Adoo Kissi Debrah, whose daughter Ella died from an asthma attack as a result of severe air pollution.

    The group will also be handing in a letter at COP26 calling for an end to new fossil fuel financing for the sake of their children’s health and future.

    Friday’s protest comes ahead of marches on Saturday where tens of thousands of people are again expected in Glasgow, with other marches in London and cities around the UK, as well as across the world.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.