Comment: Climate protests surged in 2018-2019 and have continued, sparking a crackdown by authorities using the law to criminalise and constrain activism Police officers attack activists during a protest against the expansion of Germany’s utility RWE’s Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine to Luetzerath, Germany, January 14, 2023. REUTERS/Christian Mang By Oscar Berglund and Tie Franco Brotto Oscar Berglund is a senior lecturer in international public and social policy at the University of Bristol and Tie Franco Brotto is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies. Climate and environmental protest is being criminalised and repressed around the world. The criminalisation of such protest has received a lot of attention in certain countries, including the UK and Australia . But there have not been any attempts to capture the global trend – until now. We recently published a report , with three University of Bristol colleagues, which shows this repression is indeed a global trend – and that it is becoming more difficult around the world to stand up for climate justice. This criminalisation and repression spans the global north and south, and includes more and less democratic countries. It does, however, take different forms. Our report distinguishes between climate and environmental protest. The latter are campaigns against specific environmentally destructive projects – most commonly oil and gas extraction and pipelines, deforestation, dam building and mining. They take place all around the world. Climate protests are aimed at mitigating climate change by decreasing carbon emissions, and tend to make bigger policy or political demands (“cut global emissions now” rather than “don’t build this power plant”). They often take place in urban areas and are more common in the global north. Four ways to repress activism The intensifying criminalisation and repression is taking four main forms. 1. Anti-protest […]
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