Europe cracks down on 'direct action' climate protests
STORY: They’ve thrown soup at a Van Gogh painting, glued their hands to roads, blocked traffic, sprayed paint and cut off oil pipes.
Thousands of activists across Europe demanding urgent government action against climate change
have been met with a crackdown in multiple countries.
Lawmakers in Germany, France and Britain are turning up the heat to make actions like this…illegal.
"We are seeing now extremely worrying developments where activists all over the world are experiencing increased repressions just for fighting for our present and our future."
France and Britain have passed new surveillance and detention laws,
with Britain making it illegal to lock, or glue, yourself to property.
Activists say they turned to direct action after the failure of other protest strategies.
Just Stop Oil activist Indigo Rumbelow:
"There is a large crackdown going on across the UK. Some examples of this, two of my friends, they're currently sat in prison. They've been given sentences three years and two years and seven months, and the Court of Appeal has rejected their appeal. So they now have to sit in prison for that long time."
Determined to prevent protests from gathering strength,
states in Germany and national authorities in France are invoking legal powers often used against organized crime and extremist groups to wiretap and track activists.
Police confirmed to Reuters that France has used an anti-terrorism unit to question some climate activists.
The governments in Germany and Britain say the response to the protests is aimed at preventing damaging criminal actions.
The French government declined to comment for this story but has previously said the state must be able to combat what it calls “radicalization”.
Policing data shows that in Berlin alone, more than 4,500 incidents have been registered against the ‘Last Generation’ and ‘Extinction Rebellion’ groups
causing police to spend hundreds of thousands of hours on them.
German states are also widely using preventative detention to stop people from protesting.
In June, police dragged Last Generation activist Simon Lachner from his home without shoes and put him into custody after he publicly announced his plans to protest.
"It’s important that these are all justified protests. Because the disaster situation is this bad and the threat to all of us as humanity is this enormous. It threatens our lives and all our values that we hold dear. That is why protest, even in this intense and perhaps outlandish way, is entirely justified. And that's what I'm going to plead and I'm going to bring forward various motions of evidence that show this very catastrophic situation."
Last Generation says all of its activities are transparent and not criminal,
and that activists show their faces and names during protests and announce their events in advance.
Activist anger has only been fuelled by recent heatwaves, wildfires and droughts and the planet recording its hottest ever days in July.
They say they are outraged by the lack of any urgent response and that for historical social change like winning the vote for women and the U.S. civil rights movement direct action protests has been crucial.
