Quakers in Britain are reeling from what they are saying is an unheard-of violation of one among their locations of worship by law enforcement officials who pressured their approach into a gathering home in London and arrested activists gathered there to plan Gaza warfare protests.
“Nobody has been arrested in a Quaker assembly home in residing reminiscence,” Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, stated in a statement issued after the raid.
However on Thursday night, the pacifist group stated, greater than 20 uniformed law enforcement officials, some armed with tasers, pressured their approach into the assembly home in Westminster, breaking open the entrance door “with out warning or ringing the bell.”
The officers searched the constructing and arrested six ladies at a gathering of Youth Demand, an unaffiliated activist group that was renting a room to fulfill in, the Quakers in Britain stated.
The Metropolitan Police stated the arrests adopted Youth Demand’s plans to “shut down” London with protests subsequent month, in response to British media. The police stated that whereas they acknowledged the suitable to protest, “we now have a duty to intervene to forestall exercise that crosses the road from protest into severe disruption and different criminality,” British media reported.
The arrests raised alarms in England, and got here amid a crackdown on Gaza War protesters in america, particularly on school campuses, the place some college students have denounced Israel’s prosecution of the warfare towards Hamas.
Authorized specialists say that the Trump administration has been trampling on free speech rights, and after the raid on the assembly home, Quakers in Britain voiced related considerations.
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“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful elimination of younger folks holding a protest group assembly clearly reveals what occurs when a society criminalizes protest,” Mr. Parker stated.
In recent times, Britain has enacted a number of measures to crack down on protests and granted new powers to the police.
One of many measures, Public Order Act 2023, was described by the United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, as “deeply troubling.” The legislation imposes “severe and undue restrictions” on the suitable of peaceable meeting and criminalizes some types of peaceable protest by Britons, according to the United Nations.
Youth Demand stated in a statement that when the raid occurred, it was having a “Welcome Speak” on the Quaker home to debate Gaza, the West Financial institution and the local weather disaster, and to share plans for nonviolent civil resistance actions that it has scheduled for subsequent month.
The activists have been advised that they have been being detained on suspicions of “conspiracy to trigger a public nuisance,” in response to the group. Further activists from the group have been arrested the following day, it stated.
Youth Demand stated in an e mail on Sunday that it didn’t “have the complete image but,” however that it appeared that about 10 arrests have been made on Thursday and Friday and that 11 activists’ properties have been raided. The entire activists have been launched and none have been charged, the group stated.
Youth Demand, which calls on the British authorities to cease all commerce with Israel and to lift cash from the rich to pay for environmental injury from fossil-fuel burning, was began final yr. Whereas comparatively small, a few of its protests have generated headlines.
In April, the group hung a banner and lined up youngsters’s sneakers outdoors the house of the Labour chief, Keir Starmer, earlier than he grew to become prime minister. “Cease the killing” in Gaza, the banner learn.
In an announcement after the raid, the group known as on “younger folks to take to the streets day after day and shut London down.”
Ella Grace-Taylor, 20, an actor-musician scholar who was arrested on Thursday on the assembly home, stated in a video after her launch that the group “won’t be deterred.”
“We are going to let this gas us as a result of we all know which means that we’re successful,” she stated. “It implies that the federal government, that the police, that the state is afraid of us, that they acknowledge the ability that we now have.”
The Metropolitan Police didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
