News

Women made up more than half of the speakers at November’s high-profile ORGCon digital freedom conference, which in the world of ‘tech’ is refreshing. The conference organiser, Open Rights Group (ORG), should be praised for achieving such a balance. ORG is the UK’s only grassroots organisation working to protect our right to privacy and free speech online.

ORGCon drew a mix of activists, academics and digital professionals to Friends Meeting House, London to hear some of the world…

I sing with ‘Sanctuary of Song’ in Swansea, a singing group for women, forming bonds between local community and the marginalised ‘asylum-seeking’ and refugee community of Swansea.

Bright and early on 17 October we drove to London, en route practising the songs we’d sing in parliament that afternoon under the banner of Black History Month. A motorway services stop gave us a chance to practise ‘…

Three members of Nukewatch UK briefly stopped a convoy carrying nuclear bombs on 16 November. The vehicles were leaving a base near Bannockburn on their way from Atomic Weapons Establishment Burghfield to the royal naval arms depot at Coulport near Helensburgh where the warheads are loaded onto Trident submarines.

After two years, ‘Public Interest Case Against Trident’ (PICAT) finally received a decision from the UK attorney general in late November on whether it had permission to prosecute the prime minister and the defence secretary for war crimes in relation to Britain’s nuclear weapons. Britain’s only nuclear weapons are Trident missiles – which are carried on Trident nuclear submarines.

PICAT is an initiative of the Trident Ploughshares direct action network. The project was begun by…

On 10 July, some 50 Ceredigion residents gathered in the Morlan Centre in Aberystwyth to hear Iyad Burnat bear poignant witness to a life of resistance in his native Bil’in, a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank some seven miles to the west of Ramallah. Bil’in has been divided by Israel’s separation barrier which cuts off access to half of its agricultural land.

Iyad is the head of the Bil’in Popular Committee against the Wall (PCAW) which for the last 12 years has staged…

Some of the folk pleading not guilty on 21 September at Thames magistrates court. This was one of many days of plea hearings (18 September – 9 October) for the 100 activists arrested for disrupting the set-up for the DSEI arms fair in East London.

PHOTO: Sarah Lasenby

On 25 September, a Muslim human rights activist was found guilty by Westminster magistrates of the crime of not handing over the passwords to his phone and laptop.

Muhammad Rabbani, international director of Muslim anti-repression group CAGE, ‘wilfully obstructed’ an examination under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at Heathrow airport last November (see PN 2606–2607). He was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £620 in costs.

Rabbani…

Hundreds of peace and justice events took place in the Campaign Nonviolence Week of Actions in the US in late September. Sponsors Pace e Bene say they are already aiming at next year’s action week (15–23 September 2018) which will take place just before important US congressional elections.

Campaign Nonviolence wants to frame those mid-term elections as a ‘Referendum for a Nonviolent Future’: ‘Will we ratify the policies of violence and injustice – or will we set a new course for…

On 20 September, over 40 high-level figures from around the world signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations on behalf of their countries.

They were led by the presidents of Brazil, Central African Republic, Chile, Comoros, Costa Rica, Guyana, Kiribati, Palau and South Africa. The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, said: ‘We cannot allow these doomsday weapons to endanger our world and our children’s future.’

At the moment the treaty…

Not yet dawn. 10,000 dead in Yemen. (Drink and a blanket). One million homeless. (Packed lunch, cake?) £3.3 million spent by Saudi Arabia since 2015 on British weapons. (Remember the banner). 22 of us, mostly from a choir based in Presteigne in the Welsh borders, board our coach heading for the ExCeL centre in East London where Britain hosts its biennial international arms fair. We are coming to support the blockading…

As part of an international event, a four-day fast was held in central London between Hiroshima Day, 6 August, and Nagasaki Day, 9 August, to commemorate the 300,000 deaths caused by the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945.

At 8.15am on Hiroshima Day, three fasters set out banners on railings on the Thames side of the ministry of defence, where they camped throughout the fast. By 8 August, numbers had grown to seven, and they held a one-hour protest in front of Downing Street. They…

‘Justice for the Elbit 5 — Stop Arming Israel’ demo at Aberporth test-flying site for UK-manufactured Israeli drones on 13 September. This action was in solidarity with five activists appearing before Cannock magistrates court, Staffordshire, charged under the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 for their part in shutting down the Elbit drones factory in Shenstone on 6–7 July. Charges were dropped against three defendants, while the trial of the remaining two…

Over the course of seven days in early September, thousands of activists from across the country descended on East London in a vibrant and colourful show of strength, solidarity and unity – to try to stop the set-up of the terrible DSEI arms fair.

Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI) is one of the biggest arms fairs in the world. This year, it brought 1,600 arms companies to London and put them together…

On 12 September, the TUC (Trades Union Congress) passed two ground-breaking motions, one on the conversion of military industry to socially-useful production, and the other on climate action. Both proposals stressed the need to involve workers in making change.

The conversion motion was passed by a majority after being proposed by the brand-new Artists’ Union England (established 2016) and opposed by the huge GMB union (over 600,000 members).

The motion recalled the ‘…

As we went to press, it wasn’t clear whether the regional government of Catalonia would succeed in holding its 1 October independence referendum – which has been declared illegal by Spain’s constitutional court.

The independentistas are engaged in mass non-co-operation with the Spanish state. Dock workers in Barcelona and Tarragona refused to provide services to boats carrying over 5,000 armed police ordered to disrupt the referendum.

Spanish prime minister…

At the end of August, 800 people were arrested as over 6,000 climate justice activists gathered in western Germany for the Rhineland Climate Camp, taking part in different protests against brown coal mining in the area. The arrests came during the Ende Gelände (‘Here and No Further’) weekend of mass civil disobedience involving 3,000 people. Affinity groups crossed fields (see above) to enter the Tagebau Garzweiler lignite coal mine or to block coal trains to the…

On 31 July, the high court in London overturned the convictions of five members of the Christian ‘Put Down the Sword’ affinity group who had blocked the entrance to Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Burghfield in June 2016.

Nina Carter-Brown, Nick Cooper, Angela Ditchfield, Joanna Frew and Alison Parker had been found guilty of wilful obstruction of the highway by Reading magistrates in January. Their action (using lock-on tubes) was part of a month of action organised by Trident…

On 8 August, French activist Rémi Filliau was arrested in Paris during a Clown Army action at the headquarters of En Marche (‘Forward!’), the political party of president Emmanuel Macron.

Rémi was one of 15 ‘clowns en marche arrière’ (‘backwards clowns’) who occupied the lobby of the building. The backwards 15 wanted to congratulate ‘the president of the clowns’ on his valiant opposition to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

‘We came to thank him,…

While the high court in London ruled on 10 July that arms exports to Saudi Arabia are ‘lawful’, Campaign Against Arms Trade remains confident in its legal case. We are challenging the verdict and hope that the court of appeal will overturn its ruling.

If the verdict is allowed to stand, government will regard it as a green light to keep arming human rights abusers and repressive regimes around the world. Even worse, Saudi forces will see it as a green light to continue in their…

The Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW), organiser of the series of Peace History Conferences, has a strong and creative relationship with the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London. This works because, on MAW’s side, there is an attitude not of dogmatic pacifism but of reasoned opposition to the legitimacy of war; and on the museum’s side, war is not glamourised but commemorated in all its aspects. This makes it a fitting venue for a conference like the one on 10 June, especially as the…