Thursday, December 24, 2009

Christmas In Prison For Spanish Greenpeace Activist

The director of Greenpeace in Spain, Juan López de Uralde, will be spending both Christmas and New Year in prison in Denmark. He is being held with three other activists until January 7th. His "crime" was to infiltrate the royal reception at the Copenhagen climate change summit and unfurl a banner of protest. About the only progress we can say that has been made as a result of the Copenhagen fiasco has been the advances in the criminalisation of protest. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested but then released without charge as the Danish police adopted an aggressive approach to anyone who wanted to point out that nothing was going on inside the summit hall.

7 comments:

Daniel said...

Something is quite rotten indeed in the neoliberal State of Denmark

Lavengro said...

Greenpeace subject to the law just like everybody else? Good heavens!! Whatever next???

Graeme said...

I think the treatment of the Copenhagen protestors falls under a different kind of law than that applied to most people. As if the Danish have no choice but to act the way they did.

Pethol said...

ROFL! Imagine them being imprisoned in Mexico. They would have been beat up, raped, drugged, then beat up and raped some more both by the police and the inmates. Danish prisons are like a holiday inn compared to most prisons around the world. Stop whining. They did a highly illegal act and that was punished mildly as the actual punishment is much more harsh. What they did was a direct threat to national security. They got off easy - very easy.

Graeme said...

Well I'll leave the verdict on Mexican prisons to those with more experience of them, but I can't help pointing out that your account is otherwise short of facts. They haven't even been brought before a judge yet, due to changes in Danish law which were specifically introduced to deal with protests around the Copenhagen summit. So to suggest they got off lightly for spending 3 weeks in prison when no formal charges of any kind have yet been presented is well wide of the mark. Unfurling a banner a threat to national security and a highly illegal act? The problem is that the police let them in, so maybe those concerned with controlling access should be the ones charged?

Pethol said...

They got access using false ID's - That is illegal. What did they get access to and what kind of people did they get access to?

What they did is the same as if they got access to the white house with false Id's and - unfolded a banner.
The Danish royalty is still the top of the Danish government and therefore it is a matter of national security.

I am an environmentalist to the bone - but I also follow the laws of the country I am in. I do not consider this action as anything that is constructive in any way. There are other means to get attention.
On top of this - Unfolding a banner does NOT solve global warming. The environmental solution is in the hands of each individual person around the world - not in the hands of the governments. Problem is that most of the wannabe environmentalists doesn't have a brain and therefore no rational thought. They just act on emotions and flip out over anything. The problem is not the governments. The problem is 6.5 billion immensely stupid people that are not willing to sacrifice luxury in order to cut down on the production of "stuff" that is the real problem of the global environmental issues. Wanna do something about global warming? Then go kill some hundred thousands of people and for each person you kill, plant two trees. There you have a working solution. Unfolding a fucking banner is no solution - it is just some idiot people trying to get personal attention and all the other stupid people now spend time focusing on these banner-idiots, instead of spending time on what really matters. People are so fucking easy to distract. They run randomly around like insane little children in all directions and each of them think, they are doing something good...

Graeme said...

Yes, such very very serious threat to national security that they have all been released. More like a revenge by the police for their failure to spot a limousine with Greenpeace written on it.