West criticizes Kiev for anti-protest legislation
Source: Associated Press
West criticizes Kiev for anti-protest legislation
By MARIA DANILOVA, Associated Press | January 17, 2014 | Updated: January 17, 2014 12:32pm
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian leaders came under fire from the West on Friday for passing sweeping anti-protest legislation amid demonstrations against the government that have rocked Kiev for nearly two months.
Despite fistfights and noisy objections from the opposition, the Ukrainian parliament, dominated by President Viktor Yanukovych's loyalists, passed a flurry of bills Thursday that would significantly curb the rights to protest, free speech and the activity of non-governmental organizations.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in Washington Friday that "the legislation that was rammed through the Rada (parliament) without transparency and accountability violates all the norms of the OSCE and the EU."
"We believe deeply that the people of Ukraine want to affiliate and want to be associated with Europe and they want to turn in that direction," he said. "And the steps that were taken yesterday are anti-democratic. They're wrong. They are taking from the people of Ukraine their choice and their opportunity for the future."
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/world/article/West-criticizes-Kiev-for-anti-protest-legislation-5151902.php
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[font size=1]A young man is seen with blood on his face after a confrontation with police in
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'Occupy' protesters, police clash during 'day of action'
By David Ariosto, CNN
updated 11:00 PM EST, Thu November 17, 2011
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Images above show injuries to some of the anti-war demonstrators after Oakland
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Police Open Fire on Anti-War Protestors
April 20, 2003
On April 7, in Oakland, California, police opened fire with "non-lethal" weapons on hundreds of protestors at the Oakland Docks.
Anti-war demonstrators in Oakland had gathered to picket APL, a major shipper of military cargo which as a longstanding relationship with the U.S. military. According to reports, police open fired on the protesters with rubber bullets, wooden dowel "sting-balls," and concussion grenades. Over 50 protesters were injured, some seriously, including numerous workers from local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse union. Five workers were taken to the hospital and one required surgery.
According to the New York Times, the shipping companies at the docks had asked the police to break up the demonstration. According to one observer, the police "began shooting at us minutes after their arrival."
On the same day, hundreds of protestors in the Bay Area also demonstrated at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, the San Francisco federal building, and offices of various government officials.
http://www.anti-imperialist.org/anti-war-oakland_4-20-03.html
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Tuesday, Dec 16, 2003 06:36 PM CST
“This is not America”
In Miami, police unleashed unprecedented fury on demonstrators -- most of them seniors and union members. Is this how Bush's war on terror will be fought at home?
Michelle Goldberg
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On Saturday, Nov. 22, a few dozen police on bicycles rode by the warehouse that activists protesting Miami’s Free Trade Area of the Americas summit were using as a welcome center. The big protest had taken place on Thursday, Nov. 20, and most demonstrators had already dispersed. Some were in jail, others were nursing their injuries. But the cops wanted to deliver a final message to those still around. “Bye! Don’t come back here!” shouted one. A pudgy officer gave the finger to an activist with a video camera. “Put that on your Web site,” he said. “Fuck you.”
It was the end of two days of what many observers called unprecedented police vindictiveness and violence toward activists. Certainly, complaints about the police have become a standard ritual after each major globalization protest. But what happened in Miami, say protesters, lawyers, journalists and union leaders, was anything but routine.
Armed with millions of dollars of new equipment and inflamed by weeks of warnings about anarchists out to destroy their city, police in Miami donned riot gear, assembled by the thousand, put the city on lockdown and unleashed an arsenal of crowd control weaponry on overwhelmingly peaceful gatherings.
Videos taken at the scene show protesters being beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and beanbags, and pepper-sprayed in the face. Retirees were held handcuffed and refused water for hours. Medics and legal observers, arrested in large numbers, say they were targeted. A female journalist, arrested during a mass roundup, was made to strip in front of a male policeman. A woman’s entire breast turned purple-black after she was shot there, point-blank, with a rubber bullet.
More:
http://www.salon.com/2003/12/17/miami_police/
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Miami riot police fire on protesters during a Free Trade Area
of the Americas protest Thursday, Nov. 20, 2003, in downtown Miami.
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Anti-FTAA Protestors Clash with Police
Government, Politics, and Protest: Essential Primary Sources, 2006
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The 2003 FTAA summit was held in Miami, Florida. (The city of Miami hoped that the FTAA headquarters would be built there and it offered to pay half of the estimated $12–16 million cost of building the facility.) The response of the city police to the protests that occurred during the summit was controversial. Miami spent almost $24 million on security for the FTAA summit ($10.6 million for the Miami-Dade County Police, $13 million for the Miami Police Department), not counting payments on lawsuits brought against city police. Lawsuits were brought for various violations of protestor's civil rights, including mass arrests and improper arrests; criminal violence by police; and illegal mass strip searches of female prisoners. Miami received $8.5 million in federal money from the $87-billion 2003 Iraq spending bill to cover some of the costs of defending the FTAA meeting.
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Miami police forces were determined to avoid a repeat of the chaotic situation that surrounded the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. To this end, the actions of over three dozen law-enforcement agencies were coordinated by the A protester wears a gas mask during a demonstration outside the site of the Organization of American States foreign ministers meeting in Windsor, Ontario, on June 4, 2000. AP IMAGES. Miami Police Department. Police were equipped with concussion grenades, tear gas, body armor, tazers, and other gear. After being shown video footage of Seattle by the city police, the city commissioners passed a law forbidding protestors to carry sticks, water balloons, and other objects (the law was repealed by the commissioners a few months after the FTAA meeting, in March 2004).
Accusations of criminal behavior by the police were numerous. Alleged police crimes included shooting rubber-coated steel bullets at retreating (therefore non-threatening) protestors; spraying the eyes of non-resisting protestors at point-blank range with pepper spray, which causes extreme pain and sometimes permanent damage; arresting persons for not dispersing without giving them an opportunity to disperse; tazering and beating nonviolent protestors; arresting people for merely looking like protestors; targeting of medics and journalists; and more. The human rights advocacy group Amnesty International stated in a December 16, 2005, letter to Governor Jeb Bush that police actions had violated the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials: "Concerns include reports of the indiscriminate and inappropriate use of nonlethal weapons on nonviolent protestors resulting in scores of injuries, the obstruction of those providing medical treatment, multiple and random arrests …and the denial of the right to freedom of expression and association." A Florida circuit court judge, Richard Margolius, stated in open court in December 2003 that he saw "no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers" during the protests. When told that no police officers had been charged in the protest crackdown he said, "None? Pretty sad commentary. At least from what I saw."
In April, 2005, several thousand women who were illegally strip-searched after being arrested on misdemeanor charges during the FTAA protests were awarded $6.25 million in a class-action lawsuit brought against Dade County, Florida. Only women were strip-searched, not men, apparently as a humiliation tactic. Under Florida law, it is only legal to strip-search a person charged with a felony.
The actual FTAA-protests operations plan of the Miami Police Department has remained secret, its exclusion from public records laws being affirmed by a Florida appeals court in April 2005. In 2005, other cities expecting to host controversial international economic organizations sent police representatives to Miami to study the operations plan and to model their own police responses to it. By May 2006, five lawsuits based on police actions during the protests had been brought against the Miami police and other law-enforcement agencies by the American Civil Liberties Union. As of this writing, all five cases were still being litigated.
More:
http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/ovic/PrimarySourcesDetailsPage/DocumentToolsPortletWindow?displayGroupName=PrimarySources&jsid=cfe7c5b57b7ec178eb2a900c5e4e34d2&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CCX2687500143&u=txshrpub100186&zid=0b065ace6801043e87487297d5297959#gpep_0001_0001_0_img0138
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