#protest criminalisation

The open letter provides a devastating exposure of the collapse of democracy in Britain, with the right to free speech and protest being overturned. — “warning signs of erosion of the rule of law and democracy in the United Kingdom” More than 20 international legal organisations have issued an open letter calling on authorities in the UK to “urgently cease the misuse of counter-terrorism legislation against the Filton 18”. The letter provides a devastating exposure of the collapse of democracy in Britain, with the right to free speech and protest being overturned. Eighteen members of Palestine Action (PA)—most aged in their 20s—are being held on remand and face “terrorism connected” prosecution over a protest at Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems in Filton, near Bristol, last August. Six members of PA were arrested on August 6, after they drove through security fences in a repurposed police van, entered the factory, and allegedly damaged £1 million of military equipment including “killer drones” used to target and kill Palestinian civilians. Police arrested eight more PA members between August 8 and 12 over their alleged connection to the protest. In November, the final eight were arrested. All were initially questioned and detained under counter-terrorism laws. They were held for 36 hours, extended to seven days under section 5 of the Terrorism Act (2000). Their detention under the Act meant police treated PA’s protest as involving the “commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism”. The open letter challenges the use of counter-terror laws against the Filton 18, connecting it to “a broader pattern of increasing restriction and repression of collective dissent in the United Kingdom, including in relation to the ongoing genocide in Gaza”. This includes “increasing use of anti-terrorism powers against journalists reporting on Palestine; undue restrictions on public events and discussion under the problematic ‘Prevent’ duty under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015; injunctions against Palestine-related protests on university campuses; and undue treatment or labelling of Palestine and environmental protestors as terrorists.”

The faces are different, but it’s the same authoritarianism. Keir Starmer’s team might not look or sound like Donald Trump’s, but its policies on protest and dissent are chillingly similar. So is the reason: coordinated global lobbying by the rich and powerful, fronted by rightwing junktanks. Last week, six young women were having tea and biscuits in the Quaker meeting house in Westminster. Twenty police officers forced open the door and arrested them on conspiracy charges. Had the police discovered a plot to blow up parliament or to poison the water supply? No. It was an openly advertised, routine meeting of a protest group called Youth Demand, discussing climate breakdown and the assault on Gaza. I spoke to one of the arrested women, Jennifer Kennedy. She says she is not an activist, but a student journalist who was covering the meeting. Her phone, camera and laptop were confiscated. She was held incommunicado for 16 hours: in other words, like the others arrested, she was not allowed to make a phone call, so family and friends had no idea where she was. This is a tactic that is used for serious organised crime, terrorism or espionage, to prevent suspects from disposing of evidence, intimidating witnesses or alerting other spies. While she was held, she says that the police searched her flat, looking through her books and frightened her flatmate. The police justified the raid by claiming that Youth Demand plan to “shut down London”. What this has meant previously is 10-minute blockages of individual roads: “shut downs” of the kind YD has carried out many times before. -Police forces claim to be under-resourced. But they spend vast sums and launch huge deployments against unthreatening protests. Last year they sent over 1,000 officers from 39 forces, spending £3m, to shut down a climate camp and arrest 24 people, on the grounds that they might have been planning to occupy a road outside a power station. At the same time, they fail even to investigate serious organised crime, citing insufficient resources. The police, governments and the media have sought to conflate peaceful protest with extremism and terrorism. Protest methods used for centuries, such as blocking roads, have been recast as the end of civilisation.

Britain’s crackdown on climate protest is setting “a dangerous precedent” around the world and undermining democratic rights, the UK director of Human Rights Watch has said. Yasmine Ahmed accused the Labour government of hypocrisy over its claims to be committed to human rights and international law. Ahmed said: “We’re at a stage where we’re talking about the … dangerous hypocrisy of what the UK government is saying and doing, and also the fact that the international community and the UN have [raised] and continue to raise the alarm about how this UK government responds to protest, and in particular climate protest.” In the UK “laws criminalising protests undermine democratic rights”, the NGO says in its latest annual world report, published on Thursday, adding that in the past year “the UK continued to crack down on and criminalise climate protests”. New powers granted to police by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 have had the effect of undermining “free speech, peaceful assembly, and democratic rights in the UK”, the report says. The cumulative effect of the laws, which newly criminalised or introduced harsher penalties for a range of protest tactics, as well as giving police greater discretion about when they can intervene in protest, has made taking part in climate activism increasingly risky, with the effect that fewer people are willing to risk the legal consequences. Ahmed said: “They have introduced laws which mean that the circumstances where the police can interfere and stop protesters are now much more expansive than they were.

British police arrest environmental protesters at nearly three times the global average rate, research has found, revealing the country as a world leader in the legal crackdown on climate activism. Only Australia arrested climate and environmental protesters at a higher rate than UK police. One in five Australian eco-protests led to arrests, compared with about 17% in the UK. The global average rate is 6.7%. The research comes amid an outcry over the targeting of climate and environmental protesters, with a rise in the suppression of dissent around the world as the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises take hold. It found an increase in the number and proportion of protests linked to climate and environmental destruction over the past decade, but argued that rather than tackling the issues provoking them, states are focusing on punishing dissent. Michel Forst, the UN special rapporteur for environmental defenders, said earlier this year: “In many countries, the state response to peaceful environmental protest is increasingly to repress rather than to enable and protect those seeking to speak up for the environment.” The latest research paints a picture of extensive repression of climate and environmental protest in the global north and south, with distinct characteristics in each region contributing to the overall trend. “There is an increasing criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest,” said Oscar Berglund, a political economist at the University of Bristol who led the study. “These kinds of protests have increased, climate protests quite sharply, and the response to this has been a crackdown that has to be seen in the wider political sense of a breakdown in climate action.”

Internal government documents show that Home Office ministers and staff tried to influence police and prosecutors to crack down on activists targeting the UK factories of an Israeli arms manufacturer, campaigners have claimed. Briefing notes, obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests by Palestine Action, show details of government meetings, predating the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s response in Gaza, intended to “reassure” Elbit Systems UK, an Israeli arms manufacturer, which is subject to a direct action campaign by the campaign group. Prosecutions of Palestine Action activists, who say they are trying to protect Palestinian lives and stop war crimes, have led to some convictions, including for burglary and criminal damage, but also acquittals by juries and magistrates despite defendants admitting their actions. As well as Home Office ministers attending meetings with Elbit Systems representatives, the heavily redacted briefing notes show that one was attended by a director from the Attorney General’s Office said to be representing the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). They also show that Home Office officials contacted the police about Palestine Action. Tim Crosland, a coordinator of Defend Our Juries, which claims that jurors’ absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience is being eroded by judges placing limits on what defendants can say about their motivations, said: “These disclosures, despite the extensive redaction, are the smoking gun on what has been obvious for a while: the government has been trying to put a stop to juries acquitting those who expose and resist corporate complicity in violations of international law and mass loss of life.