Climate crisis, arresting peaceful activists fighting for their and our future is sacrilege

“COP28:governments speak, the earth sinks."It is the slogan used by Extinction Rebellion on December 9, when activists staged a nonviolent protest action coordinated in five cities.Arrests immediately followed: 28, specifically, on charges of interruption of public service, private violence, unauthorized demonstration and spillage of dangerous substances.Five people were served with a 4-year expulsion order - which includes not being able to return to the municipality from which they are removed - and another three with a 48-hour urban warning - an administrative sanction with a removal order.The group's press office was also stopped and then accused.

It is only the latest act of a progressive trend towards criminalization of dissent which we have been witnessing in recent years, and which is affecting climate activists in particular.Criminalization also happens when it comes to nonviolent protests, and it was the same in this case:yes, because what the newspapers defined as "environmentalist blitz” to denounce the political failure of COP28 and of world governments in combating the climate crisis consisted in the spillage of fluorescein into water, a harmless substance which does not damage flora or fauna and which disappears in a few hours.At the same time, the Po river in Turin, the Tiber in Rome, the Reno canal in Bologna, the canal in Milan and the Grand Canal in Venice were dyed green.It was in Venice that the arrests took place, after the Ultima Generazione activists on December 7th they had thrown liquid mud mixed with chocolate against the Basilica of San Marco.

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Among the people reported there was a musician who took part in the action playing the double bass on the notes of My heart will go on, the soundtrack to Titanic.“Being arrested for demonstrating is always a contradiction, but being arrested when you do it peacefully for a cause that concerns the future and the good of all humanity is a sacrilege,” wrote the journalist Marisandra Lizzi, who is also the double bass player's mother.“Do we really want to arrest young people who are fighting for a future, who demonstrate peacefully to give us and future generations the chance to live without seeing the world sink?Parents of the world, let's unite."

To defend the freedom of demonstration of climate activists, on 11 December the Torino Respira committee launched the Change.org platform a petition which has already obtained over 400 signatures including those of scientists, journalists and activists.“For years, climate movements have been carrying out their demonstrations in a peaceful and nonviolent way, using their bodies and their intelligence to bring their message to as many people as possible with the means at their disposal,” reads the petition.“However, law enforcement increasingly reacts to these demonstrations in a disproportionate manner compared to the seriousness of the acts committed, using tools designed to combat criminal phenomena that have nothing to do with the intentions of those protesting and with the nature and consequences of their actions."

And in fact, the last episode dates back only a few days ago.December 4th, in Rome 12 Last Generation activists were arrested and spent three days in prison for a road block along the A12 Rome – Civitavecchia motorway.The initial charge of attack on transport safety was dropped for them, but the charge of private violence remains.“But what violence?”, asks himself geologist Mario Tozzi, who was present.“I only saw passive resistance from the activists, a method that is traditionally used in this type of protests.The road block may not be acceptable, certainly annoying, but it is not violent."

The assumption from which we must start is that "nonviolence is not necessarily kind", as he wrote above Blue suitcase Roberta Covelli.Civil disobedience “is not a gala dinner, rebellion does not follow the rules of etiquette.Expecting the protest to be polite can even translate into a form of violence, because the request for methods of mobilization that do not disturb anyone often implies an inability to conceive of dissent and deal with conflict."

While climate activists continue to face arrests, the trial against the three members of Ultima Generation who in January 2023 had thrown washable paint against the Senate headquarters.The three, just in their twenties, risk up to five years in prison on charges of aggravated damage, considered more serious than the crime of "defacing and soiling other people's property":the aggravating circumstance, introduced with the second security decree approved in 2019 by the then Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, was applied despite the fact that the walls of the building were cleaned again within a few hours.

"It is ignoble that this Government chooses to lock up people in prison who, through the sacrosanct constitutional right to demonstrate, ask for security and prevention for the greatest crisis of our times", we read in a note from Last Generation.“The gravity and urgency of the eco-climate crisis are continually hidden by a media, political and economic status quo from which it is convenient to hide the situation”.

In recent years there has been a trend towards the criminalization of demonstrations, even peaceful ones:most recently on 12 July the Senate approved a bill against "eco-vandals", proposed by the minister of culture Gennaro Sangiuliano, to punish damage, defacement, soiling and illicit use of cultural and landscape assets with more severe penalties.The bill, which has yet to pass the Chamber, provides, in addition to criminal sanctions, an autonomous administrative sanction imposed by the prefect for a sum of between 20 thousand and 60 thousand euros.A few months earlier, at the end of 2022, the so-called “anti-rave” decree.And even before that there had been Salvini's safety decrees, which in addition to having aggravated the crime of damage, reintroduced the crime of road blocking.

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The same line was also followed by the centre-left:i “Minniti decrees” of 2017 introduced the so-called “Urban Daspo”, allowing mayors and prefects to prohibit access to certain areas of the city to individuals deemed dangerous.But the problem is not just Italian:in 2022 environmental groups were targeted across Europe, with thousands of climate activists arrested for peacefully expressing their ideas.

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