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Danish police arrest 1,225 protesters
COPENHAGEN — As heads of state begin arriving for climate talks in Copenhagen, jittery police have arrested 1,225 people during two days of demonstrations in the Danish capital, prompting criticism from activists and the press.
On Sunday, 257 people were arrested after police found stones and gasmasks in a van connected to an unauthorized protest. On Saturday, 968 others were arrested at a mass demonstration that attracted more than 60,000 people. Most were released within a few hours but activists complained that the sweeping arrests were indiscriminate and heavy handed.
“The problem here is that they’re targeting people who haven’t done anything,” said Ida Thuesen, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International.
“We don’t like the idea that there were people sitting in the streets for hours, who hadn’t done anything but take part in a very peaceful and very nice demonstration.”
Amnesty has been critical of a newly enacted law that allows the police to make “preventive arrests” and to keep people for up to 12 hours before presenting them before a judge.
“We saw that we could have a situation where suddenly we’d have huge arrests, like yesterday when 1,000 people were arrested but only three people were charged with anything,” Thuesen. “When you give the police that kind of permission, there’s a risk that it will end up running out of control, as it probably did yesterday.”
In the week since the climate talks began, riot police have had a heavy presence in the usually sleepy capital, and authorities have built large steel cages to house the detainees inside an empty beer hall.
“We have already said that we cannot avoid that some innocent people will be detained,” said Lars Borg, a spokesman for the Copenhagen police. “We are very sorry about that.” He said that on Sunday police had targeted “troublemakers” in possession of gasmasks, stones and paint. However, protesters participating in demonstrations ran a risk simply by being there, he said, even if the protests were authorized and legal.
Among those arrested on Saturday was a 51-year-old Hara Krishna practitioner.
“We continued to dance and sing,” the woman, Connie Froesig Jensen, told the Danish daily, Politiken. “I told the others, ‘we have to learn from everything; no use getting angry.''
Source: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30530.html