Nick is one of twenty-three Australian Youth Delegates to Copenhagen Climate Negotiations (5-18 Dec, 2009).
This is his collection of stories, videos, photos and links that aim to be informative, funny, relevant and recent.
Rally to free the climate prisoners
Today I participated in a post-Copenhagen rally to support an Australian, Natasha Verco, who has been detained in Denmark since 13 December on bogus charges. A group of twenty people from all around Sydney met outside the Danish Embassy in Sydney with a letter from Friends of the Earth Australia to give the Danish Ambassador.
Here is the ABC report and here is the Sydney Morning Herald.
My sign says ‘Lock-up the polluters not the people’
The story behind Tash’s arrests and the arrests of many climate protesters is very concerning. Know of the dangers of climate change to the planet and seeing the failure of the current global system to address climate issues, it is not hard to feel for the protesters. These people are passionate about climate justice and are facilitating others to speak loudly and clearly. Without these people organising the chaos, it is much more likely that groups of people angry about inaction will get violent.
Tash Verco was arrested preemptively and has been held for three weeks without bail charged with ‘incitement’. She has not been allowed to phone her mother. Tash Verco has a strong history in the Sydney environment movement having co-founded Friends of the Earth Sydney and has been involved with supporting Indigenous rights campaigns amongst other things. I met Tash through the Australian Student Environment Network (ASEN) where we participated in a rally in support of Indigenous rights.
Tash was helping organise the ‘Reclaim Power’ action in Copenhagen which was supposed to bring together people from inside the Bella Centre and from the outside in a peaceful statement that the people of the world can work this out. Instead, three days before the protest, she was arrested. Along with the arrests of other activists, this left a vacuum in the organisation of the protests and meant that there was more likely to be violence. We were told today that she could be in prison for a full year.
Tash is not alone. There were almost two thousand people arrested in Copenhagen and many are still in prison. Many people demonstrating for real climate solutions have had their hands tied. It is not fair that the lobbyists for coal and carbon polluting industries could easily access the negotiators and the people were locked-out or locked-up. The criminals are the ones selling our planet’s future for coal and oil.
Cheers
N.
NEW UPDATE Latest news from ABC is that Tash has been released = )
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