Quakers in Britain are reeling from what they are saying is an unheard-of violation of considered one of their locations of worship by law enforcement officials who compelled their method into a gathering home in London and arrested activists gathered there to plan Gaza struggle protests.
“Nobody has been arrested in a Quaker assembly home in dwelling reminiscence,” Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, mentioned in a statement issued after the raid.
However on Thursday night, the pacifist group mentioned, greater than 20 uniformed law enforcement officials, some armed with tasers, compelled their method 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 girls at a gathering of Youth Demand, an unaffiliated activist group that was renting a room to satisfy in, the Quakers in Britain mentioned.
The Metropolitan Police mentioned the arrests adopted Youth Demand’s plans to “shut down” London with protests subsequent month, in accordance with British media. The police mentioned that whereas they acknowledged the precise to protest, “we now have a accountability to intervene to stop exercise that crosses the road from protest into critical 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 struggle in opposition to Hamas.
Authorized consultants say that the Trump administration has been trampling on free speech rights, and after the raid on the assembly home, Quakers in Britain voiced comparable considerations.
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“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful elimination of younger individuals holding a protest group assembly clearly exhibits what occurs when a society criminalizes protest,” Mr. Parker mentioned.
Lately, 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 “critical and undue restrictions” on the precise of peaceable meeting and criminalizes some types of peaceable protest by Britons, according to the United Nations.
Youth Demand mentioned in a statement that when the raid befell, it was having a “Welcome Discuss” 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 instructed that they have been being detained on suspicions of “conspiracy to trigger a public nuisance,” in accordance with the group. Extra activists from the group have been arrested the subsequent day, it mentioned.
Youth Demand mentioned in an e mail on Sunday that it didn’t “have the total 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. All the activists have been launched and none have been charged, the group mentioned.
Youth Demand, which calls on the British authorities to cease all commerce with Israel and to boost cash from the rich to pay for environmental harm from fossil-fuel burning, was began final 12 months. Whereas comparatively small, a few of its protests have generated headlines.
In April, the group hung a banner and lined up kids’s footwear exterior the house of the Labour chief, Keir Starmer, earlier than he turned prime minister. “Cease the killing” in Gaza, the banner learn.
In a press release after the raid, the group known as on “younger individuals to take to the streets day after day and shut London down.”
Ella Grace-Taylor, 20, an actor-musician pupil who was arrested on Thursday on the assembly home, mentioned in a video after her launch that the group “is not going to be deterred.”
“We’ll let this gas us as a result of we all know because of this we’re successful,” she mentioned. “It implies that the federal government, that the police, that the state is afraid of us, that they acknowledge the facility that we now have.”
The Metropolitan Police didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
