MELBOURNE, Australia – When climate protesters took to the streets of Sydney this week, including blocking one of its busiest traffic tunnels for more than an hour, they were met with fury. of government officials, who labeled them “professional harm” and warned that they would see “The book was thrown at them.”
The 24 people arrested in this week’s protests face up to two years in prison and fines of up to $15,000 under a new state law passed in April covering protests that disrupted businesses. economic. Previously, the penalty was a fine of up to $400, with no jail time.
Human rights activists and legal groups are now questioning whether the law imposes too harsh penalties on nonviolent protests and is mainly used against climate activists or not.
Sophie McNeill, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, said: “It is truly an alarming trend across Australia that the protest movement is increasingly being targeted by the Australian authorities day by day. more and more disproportionate.
Climate protesters, she added, are being subjected to “hateful legal action and excessive police attention”.
The government of New South Wales, of which Sydney is the largest city, has said it supports climate change protests and action, with reason.
A spokesman for Paul Toole, the state’s police minister, said in an email: “The act of protest in itself is not illegal, if authorized. “But chaining yourself to the wheel of a car to block your way into tunnels and roads, or to plan similar acts, will not be tolerated.”
None of the protesters received prison sentences under the new law.
Sydney protesters come from Australia lockdown, one of a number of groups working to attract attention for disrupting traffic and business in New South Wales. They blocked roads, hung from bridges and climbed on cranes and cargo ships to protest against what they said was government inaction on climate change.
After a wave of protests in March, when activists disrupted operations at a major port and blocked off a busy bridge, the state government rushed to pass a new law that would increase penalties for illegal traffickers. Protests disrupt major roads, harbors and train stations.
The bill passed with widespread support, including from the opposition Labor Party, but was denounced by the Greens as “deeply anti-democratic”.
Other states are set to follow similar laws. In Tasmania, legislation is being made to introduce harsher penalties, including prison sentences, for protesters who inconvenience business. In Victoria, a proposal to Parliament would allow protesters trying to stop logging in certain forests to be sentenced to up to a year in prison.
While the laws are not directly aimed at climate activists and cover any kind of illegal protest, human rights groups say they were introduced in response to climate change protests. Queen.
The Government of New South Wales has speak that the new laws “create the correct balance between the right to freedom of expression and the right to peaceful protest, and the right for people to safely continue their lives.” Laws protect strikers and protesters get police approval for rallies – something groups like Blockade Australia do not.
“There’s a highly recognized way to protest,” said Paul Dunstan, the state’s police assistant commissioner, on Monday. “There is a way to do it, but the way they did it today is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
Protesters, he said, threw bicycles and trash cans into the aisles of police officers, reporters and passers-by, in behavior that was “nothing criminal”.
Protest laws must reflect the balance between freedom of expression and dissent and ensure that protests are not violent or inconvenient, said Greg Barns, a human rights and crime lawyer. was a criminal justice spokesman for the nation’s largest bar association. He said: “I think that in Australia, sometimes governments tend to get it wrong – in other words, using the guise of public inconvenience and economic inconvenience as a means to limit protest, ” he said.
He added, because Australia lacks a Bill of Rights that stipulates freedom of expression, “governments can give the police fairly broad powers and regulate protest activity to a greater extent than what is possible.” they can do in other countries.”
For their part, activists are undaunted and say extreme measures are needed to force change in a country that has been dragging the heels of climate action for years.
Zelda Grimshaw, 56, a spokeswoman for Blockade Australia, said: “Of course that level of repression is appalling. But climate activists connected to the group are “much more scared about the climate decline we’re experiencing, so we won’t be discouraged,” she said.
Australia has been battered by the harsh climate, including droughts, floods and wildfires, over the past few years. Floods “1 in 100 years” happened almost every year, and floods devastated the northeast of the country earlier this year especially serious, causing 22 deaths. The Black Summer wildfires of 2019 and 2020 were the worst wildfires in the country’s recorded history.
Activists from Blockade Australia also say they have been followed and threatened by police. Two weeks ago, authorities monitored and then raided a camp where activists had been, civic groups condemn “Police extremism in pre-protest control.”
Mark Davis, an attorney representing some of the group’s members, said some of them were pulled over by police for random breath alcohol tests and had their cars searched. In addition, he said, many of those arrested were subject to tough bail conditions, such as being banned from driving or being asked to give police access to their laptops if required. .
These are the same strategies that police apply to biker gangs, he said. “Even if they can’t be caught in the middle of a crime, they can render their lives and organizations useless,” Davis said. “They can make their lives miserable by constantly spying on them and harassing them, digging them up and dragging them to court over very minor issues.”
