Credits: Michiel Bot

By various conference organizers and participants, including Joaquín Fuentealba, Madeleine Walker, Michiel Bot, Jeff Handmaker, and Phillip Paiement

On January 25, 2024, Tilburg Law School hosted a conference on "Protest under Pressure." The conference was organized by Daniel Augenstein, Michiel Bot, and Phillip Paiement of the Department of Public Law and Governance, with Jeff Handmaker of the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Marthe Heringa of the Legal Mobilization Platform.

In recent years, policing and prosecution tactics have dramatically impacted activists and members of social movements working on issues such as environmental and climate justice, racial justice, LGBTQI+ rights, migrant rights, indigenous rights, and anti-apartheid campaigns. The increasing risks of violence, detention, and surveillance faced by these activists raise fundamental concerns about the constitutional space for legitimate political speech and action, including civil disobedience. The conference provided a forum for discussing the challenges that these activists face, as well as strategies - legal, political and organizational - for confronting these challenges. The participants also discussed the impacts that these repressive actions have had on public forums of political speech and action and democratic institutions.

The conference departed from traditional academic formats in various ways. The seventy-five participants roughly included equal numbers of academics, activists, and legal practitioners, which allowed both for a productive exchange of experiences, perspectives, and strategies and for a lively discussion of the relation between academia, legal practice, and activism. The program did not include any formal presentations, let alone keynote lectures, but consisted of workshops in which all participants participated equally. The morning workshops were organized around specific causes: climate and environmental justice; justice for Palestine; racial justice and migration; and gender and queer justice. The afternoon sessions thematized different modes of legal and political pressure and protest: digital surveillance; securitization; SLAPPs and other forms of lawfare, and transnational activist networks.

Thanks to generous financial support from Tilburg Law School, the Department of Public Law and Governance, the ERC project Translitigate, the International Institute for Social Studies, the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Consortium, and the Netherlands Network of Human Rights Research, we were able to invite various participants from the Global South, which decentered Eurocentric perspectives on global issues, and allowed us not only to discuss how new modes of repressing protest “travel” transnationally and can be forms of legal mobilization in their own right, but also to learn from and connect modes of resisting these modes of repression through other forms of legal mobilization.

To give a more specific sense of the kinds of discussions we had: in the workshop on racial justice and migration, we first discussed what have been some of the most politically impactful protests in the field of racial justice and migration. Participants mentioned Kick Out Zwarte Piet and the repression their protests faced over time in Gouda and Rotterdam, as well as the targeting of Kick Out Zwarte Piet activists by extreme right activists. Participants also discussed protests against Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the deepening of the AfD racialization of the debate on migration against people that are deemed not “German enough.” We discussed the difference of treatment between nationals and foreigners, and the need for white protesters to acknowledge their privilege with regards to the topics and speak up; the “irritation” component of protest; the need for organization in the sense of timing and putting together a constituency and an emphasis on how crucial it is to get in contact with policy makers; and the need to take media into account with regard to the framing that can be attached to the protest. We recalled the need to remind authorities of the UN Human Rights Committee’s 2020 argument that “peaceful assemblies can in some cases be inherently or deliberately disruptive and require a significant degree of toleration,” and that “the prohibition of ‘public disorder’ in domestic law should not be used unduly to restrict peaceful assemblies.”

Then we discussed what legal developments participants identified as restrictions of activists’ ability to influence decision-making on anti-racism, xenophobia and migration, including developments in immigration law and border control, criminal law, and civil liability for mishandling and for peaceful protests, administrative handling of permits for protest and campaign activities, and constitutional and fundamental rights protections for political speech. One participant brought up punitive legal proceedings in Vienna against people who bought tickets to support migrants. Another participants mentioned that South Africa proposed to withdraw from the UN Convention on Refugees and to re-enter with reservations on several key articles. Some participants noted that there is quite some legal space to protest in the Netherlands, and even encouragement on the part of the government and various institutions for people to speak their minds. There was, however, a general worry about undocumented people exercising their right to protest in light of their precarious migration status; this has led some people to engage in less publicly visible actions or informal acts of solidarity.

Finally, we discussed what opportunities participants saw to strengthen activists’ rights. Participants affirmed that universities should be spaces where dissent can be voiced, and argued a need to democratize university governance, to be vigilant about the increasing dependency of universities on external funding, and to oppose police presence on campuses. Some participants discussed possibilities to revive the global trade union movement, and one participant argued the need to democratize the narrative around climate change. We discussed possibilities and pitfalls of public interest litigation. We discussed the need to listen closely to marginalized voices, and to give more attention to solidarities between the Global North and the Global South and within the Global South. We discussed possibilities for building broader democratic coalitions, negotiating the need to not compromise on democratic political ideals and the need to include people. And we discussed the need to communicate the legitimacy of protest, the need to decolonize knowledge, and the need to disrupt antidemocratic ideologies about “identity” and “security” in order to open up possibilities for democratic political imagination.

The “Protest under Pressure” conference delved into crucial themes surrounding the challenges faced by activists, legal professionals, academics, and social movements globally. The conference highlights the impact of repressive tactics on advocacy for various causes, such as climate and environmental justice, racial justice, gender and queer rights, migrant rights, and anti-apartheid campaigns. Emphasis was placed on the need for intersectional strategies that encompass legal, policing, and organizational aspects to confront crackdowns on legitimate political speech and action, including civil disobedience.

The conference’s innovative format, including workshops with equal participation from academics, activists, and legal practitioners facilitated a rich exchange of experiences and perspectives. It highlighted the challenges faced by activists in navigating legal restrictions, and the importance of strategic approaches to strengthen activists rights whilst acknowledging the risks involved, especially for those from marginalized communities. The conference provided a platform for critical dialogue and collaboration, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for justice, democracy, and human rights in the face of challenges to the fundamental rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and protest.

Bio:

The Legal Mobilization Platform is a Consortium of academics and practitioners that was launched in January 2023. The Platform consists of around 300 individual members and more than 35 institutional partners. It focuses on themes pertaining to racial justice, climate justice and socio-economic justice; for more information, see: www.iss.nl/LMP.