Entries tagged ‘denmark’

Good OpEd piece by Jasper Teulings of Greenpeace on the treatment of four activists who crashed an official banquet during the COP15 talks.

Before her arrest, Nora told an interviewer that she was aware of the possible consequences of what she intended to do but Nora assumed, as did we all, that in Denmark the law would play by the law. She would be arrested, charged, released until trial and then, if convicted, perhaps sentenced to a fine or some time in jail.

Nora, charged but not convicted, was held for twenty days in a prison cell. For most of this time she was permitted to receive no letters, books or family visits. From arrest through Christmas and New Year she had no contact with her husband and two young children.

(…)

After the arrest, Greenpeace guaranteed that, if the activists were released, they would voluntarily return to Copenhagen to stand trial. To further facilitate the police investigation, Greenpeace immediately offered its full co-operation to Danish police and provided them with comprehensive details of the activity. A request from Greenpeace asking the Danish police to specify what additional information they required in order to complete their investigation was met with two weeks of silence. While the police claimed their detention was necessary for the investigation, it turns out that the Four were only questioned briefly on their first day in custody and for 15 minutes shortly before their release.

Danish police has acted questionably during COP15, and seeing how this protest has been handled isn’t very encouraging. Restricting peaceful protest is bad for democracy, and unfortunately Denmark has become somewhat more restrictive over the past few months.