• qaz@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Some time ago a politician in my country announced they would start treating the people who protested at highways harsher. She said “people think these people are just protestors, but they’re criminals”* and that they were “damaging the rule of law”*.

    * Translated

    Earlier on Tuesday, the College for Human Rights ruled that the right to demonstrate is “under serious pressure” due to the arrests of activists. They had called for the blockade of the important thoroughfare.

    Yesilgöz does not respond to this criticism. She says that the Ministry of Justice and Security will look into it together with the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry is already looking into the right to demonstrate, about which reports have been published *2.

    /* 2 They’re currently looking into methods to restrict the right to demonstrate.

    It’s honestly really worrying how people just accept and even approve of these actions. It’s not just because people are being inconvenienced, almost everyone I spoke to never noticed it themselves and that’s honestly the scary part.

    • goferking (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      21 hours ago

      There are states in America where it’s legal to run over protestors.

      They say it’s only if the driver feels threaten but already had examples of drivers getting away after either driving though people leaving or going out of their way to drive into the protests so it looks like they’re just trying to get away from the protestors as they run them over

    • sjmulder@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 days ago

      It was surreal to read about talk of extremism, social disruption and the calls for corporal punishment (by police), long jail sentences and more, all for a 5-10 minute delay caused by the A12 blockade, when the day after I was helping out at the Egmond Half Marathon there was real disruption, where people really couldn’t go places with their cars… not to mention events like the Dam tot Damloop or Amsterdam Marathon that effectively put parts of our capital city on lockdown. No calls for water cannons there.

      People might say “Those are not the same!” and that’s true - sport events are not a constitutional right.

      • boomzilla@programming.dev
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        18 hours ago

        Or when EU farmers transformed Brussels into a warzone [1] or caused havoc and many (also fatal) accidents in Germany [2] and France [3]?

        “That’s different. One are terrorists and the others are fighting for you to still have food on your table”.

        Ok. Got it. I’ll do my patriotic duty and won’t buy any greenhouse produced veggies from the Netherlands anymore and start drinking German milk again.

        [1] AP article about farmer protests in Brussels

        [2] Google translated article from “Der Spiegel”

        [3] Article from France24 about a fatal car accident

      • SirQuackTheDuck@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        People might say “Those are not the same!” and that’s true - sport events are not a constitutional right.

        Hehe, I grinnikked

      • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yeah, sport events like that normally work with emergency services so that there are alternate or controlled routes for things like ambulances and fire trucks.

        Meanwhile highway protests can block emergency services with no forethought. Imagine your parent died of a heart attack because EMS couldn’t get past some people blocking a road in a protest meant to inconvenience the general public who mostly already agree with their overall goals.

        • sjmulder@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 day ago

          The A12 protest is very willing to coordinate emergency routes, in any case they allow for emergency service passage (this regularly happens), and their location is easily routed around. Overall their impact is less than run of the mill roadworks and not comparable in the slightest to a major event.