Zelter, Angie

This is a moment of huge potential

On one hand, there are many reasons to feel the future is bleak: recent failure of COP27,  vicious attacks on migrants, unravelling living standards, widening inequality, crashing biodiversiy, and extreme weather events brought about by worsening climate conditions to name a few. On the other hand, there is a unique opportunity to unite across divides for effective action, and there is an amazing potential for change. 

Along with the peace…

To mark the Colston Four acquittal, we asked some other campaigners who’d been found ‘not guilty’ in protest cases for their reactions. We’ve put them in chronological order of their earliest not-on-technical-grounds acquittal (some of them have multiple court victories).

I was delighted to see the acquittal of the Colston Four for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it kept an evidently lovely bunch of people out of jail.

Secondly, it led to a whole raft of MPs…

Several hundred peace activists took part in XR Peace actions in London during the October occupations and actions by the climate action group Extinction Rebellion (XR).

There were 57 arrests on different charges: causing a public nuisance, highway obstruction, aggravated trespass, criminal damage, and breaching ‘section 14’ orders. (Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986…

Trident Ploughshares have chosen June this year for a month of nonviolent civil resistance (blockades, citizens’ inspections, cutting fences – anything nonviolent and creative) at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Burghfield.

Threatening mass destruction impacts the whole social change movement because at its heart it supports a monetarised, exploitative, inhumane and deeply unethical divisive system.

Nuclear weapons and the militarisation…

Trident Ploughshares has today, 1 October 2015, launched a project to encourage groups around England and Wales to go to their local magistrates court to try and initiate a citizen's prosecution against the secretary of state for defence for conspiring to commit a war crime.

If this is done in many places, lots of local people will hear the arguments for and against Trident and the legal system will have to deal with the multiple attempts to get the courts to examine the legality of…

On 11 March, 14 singers from Wales, London and Corby sang Trident – A British War Crime: An Oratorio in the lobby hall of the house of commons in London, writes Angie Zelter. The singers used the right to lobby MPs by singing for 15 minutes rather than speaking. The sergeant at arms told us that we could possibly get official permission to perform the oratorio in the houses of parliament. Photo: Action AWE www.actionawe.org
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Machynlleth Gaza vigil. Photo: Marian Delyth

The heart-breaking news from Gaza spurned solidarity actions across Wales: vigils, marches and fundraising. Phil Steele of Bangor & Ynys Môn Peace & Justice group said that the ‘group normally take a break in August but, as so often happens, events allowed little respite’. He reported: ‘August was dominated by the terrible news from Gaza. This coincided with the group showing the ‘Silent Lives’ exhibition of children’s photographs of life…

At 2.30pm on 30 June, 15 people arrived to report the Trident nuclear weapons system as a crime at Llandrindod police station as part of the Action AWE week of ‘Reportings of Trident Crime’ all around the country.

A Llandrindod police sergeant said that a rural police force could not deal with these kinds of crimes as they had no knowledge of international law. I asked that they deal with it in the same way as they would deal with a report of a threat to murder, because when the…

Bora, 31 years old, had her arms severely bruised when police battered her plastic arm-lock with hammers; Dr Song, 54 years old, had three teeth broken by police; 75-year-old Father Mun was pushed off a large concrete tetra-pod by a coastal guard resulting in four broken vertebrae.

These are just three recent examples of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the South Korean authorities who are brutally enforcing the…

After experiencing my first couple of week-long prison sentences in the 1980`s - when all I did was keep my head down - I started to learn how to continue my actions and resistance from “inside”. I decided that I must be myself and really live, wherever I was, and that I did not stop being a conscious, political person just because the state had incarcerated me.

I now consider nonviolent resistance whilst in prison to be part of our struggle for a better world—a way of confronting…

David
On the face of it, and for most of the time, men and women have been able to work well together in the TP campaign, but I am far from sure why this is so. I recall the early discussions about a related issue —the extent to which we should have a rigorous approach to decision-making-by-consensus. We have opted for a more easy-going style on that one, on the ground of pragmatism, but we get quite uneasy about it from time to time in spite of regular checking out with our…

I was 60 on world environment day – 5th June 2011 and a few days later took a 2-day hike along the Offa’s Dyke path, with panoramic views of the welsh borders, a contested area for so many centuries, I had time to reflect on years of campaigning for peace and environmental justice.

I often feel despair, and wonder what’s the point of all our protests when Britain is still threatening mass destruction by renewing its nuclear arsenal[1], still sells weapons to repressive regimes, still…

At the 15 February Big Blockade of the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), the Welsh were assigned to Construction Gate, one of the most important gates for vehicle access in the coming months.

The Welsh started arriving around 6am. Around 6.30am, vans with internationals arrived, followed quickly by more Welsh groups and Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhists.

People with metal lock-on tubes and a very effective lock-on drum of four positioned themselves in the…

From late October to late November a bunch of activists from Norfolk, Suffolk and London are organising a month of actions and events in and around Charles Clarke's home town - Norwich.

Charles Clarke, Home Secretary, is the MP for Norwich South. He is responsible for both law and order, and for protecting our civil liberties, as enshrined in the Human Rights Act 1998. So what is the cheery man up to then?

Well he is taking liberties - detention without trial, the removal of…

In December 2001, about 35 women from Britain joined with a similar number of US citizens to fill the gap left by the irresponsible international community in the Occupied Territories.

This is the international community which seems to have no problem in getting millions of pounds and thousands of soldiers together to bomb the hell out of countries, but cannot deploy peacekeepers and human rights monitors to stop violence and terror when ordinary people call for it.

We went…