2010-01-10
Police tactics seen at the recent Copenhagen summit are undermining the right to protest peacefully
Jonas Christoffersen
In the aftermath of the climate change conference in Copenhagen, a lot of questions are being asked about the way police dealt with environmental activists and demonstrators.
Connected to this is the case of the Greenpeace activists who gatecrashed the state banquet hosted by Queen Margrethe II during the conference. They have just been released after spending nearly three weeks in police detention.
Their detention was apparently prolonged because they used false number plates to get past the security checks but one has to ask: was it really necessary to detain these activists for so long for such a minor offence? Greenpeace is after all a peaceful NGO which has a reputation for carrying out publicity stunts of this nature. In a similar case in Belgium, the Greenpeace activists were held for a mere 24 hours.
The Greenpeace case seems to fit with a wider pattern of increased police powers and a dwindling tolerance for protesters and activists across the globe.
Admittedly, we are living with the legacy of the 1995 Seattle meeting and the Gothenburg EU summit in 2001, when rioting by anti-globalisation protesters caused large-scale vandalism and mayhem. But one has to ask how far we should go to avoid such confrontations at international gatherings.
Should the police be allowed to tap the phones of organisations such as Greenpeace to pre-empt acts of public disobedience as happened in Copenhagen?
And what about the mass detention of mainly peaceful protesters?
During the course of the Copenhagen climate summit, the police carried out mass arrests on a scale never before seen in this small and largely peaceful Scandinavian country. In one incident close to a thousand demonstrators were forced to sit for hours with their arms tied behind their backs in freezing temperatures. Without any toilet facilities, many activists had no choice but to pee in their pants, a humiliating experience.
From a rights perspective this mass detention was also worrying. It appears that the vast majority of the protesters, who were innocent of any wrongdoing, were not informed about why they were being detained. So far, more than 600 people have complained to the authorities about this one incident.
This kind of policing casts protesters collectively as a suspect group and is likely to cause what the European Court of Human Rights has termed “the chilling effect”. This refers to how such sweeping police powers tend to miss their target and affect large numbers of innocent protesters, leading to a situation where ordinary law-abiding citizens avoid participating in demonstrations because of the high risk of being detained. The corralling of hundreds of demonstrators in London during the G20 summit in April 2009 indicates that this is an international trend.
But simply criticising police behaviour is missing the point. The root cause of the problem is new legislation which allows governments to greatly extend police powers without sufficient checks and controls.
In Denmark the government introduced the so-called “hooligan package” at the end of November. This legislation increased sanctions for demonstrators who refuse to obey police instructions and allowed the police to pre-empt rioting by carrying out mass arrests. Previously demonstrators could be detained for a maximum of six hours but the new legislation allows the police to keep people in custody for up to 12 hours.
The “chilling effect” of this new hooligan package has already been documented. In a survey carried out during the summit, nearly a fifth of Danes stated that the risk of being arrested under the new rules would prevent them from demonstrating.
This can be blamed largely on the vagueness of the new police powers. It’s not clear, for instance, how peaceful demonstrators can avoid arrest if violence or vandalism does break out. What is certain, though, is that the new legislation has the potential to undermine basic democratic freedoms such as the right to free assembly and freedom of speech.
At the Danish Institute for Human Rights we criticised the potential of the new legislation to undermine human rights and constitutional freedoms during the bill’s proposal stage, and we were also critical of the way it was rushed through the Danish parliament just before the summit took place.
We hope that the authorities in other countries do not copy the Danish example and hand over such overwhelming powers of detention to the police. If the methods used at the Copenhagen summit become the norm, we risk a “chilling effect” that will undermine the democratic values which the European countries claim to uphold.