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Civil Rights

Public Order Act Dubbed ‘The Worst Attack’ On Dissent ‘For Decades’

May 7, 2023 Tom Anderson, The Canary. , , ,
The draconian Public Order Act was given royal assent on 2 May, dramatically increasing police powers to arrest protesters. The Home Office has already cited the new Act in threatening letters to anti-monarchists. The campaign group Republic received intimidating letters this week, listing the arrest powers under the new Act. Extinction Rebellion has also received similar threats. In fact, the Guardian reported that one ‘senior’ insider, who knew about the discussions between the police and the government, confirmed that the Act had been brought into force early, ahead of the coronation on 6 May.

Federal Lawsuit Filed Against Washington DC Over Police Violence

February 23, 2023 Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. , , , ,
The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), and its Center for Protest Law & Litigation, filed a federal lawsuit against the District of Columbia challenging the Metropolitan Police Department’s “repressive and violent tactics including the authorized indiscriminate use of ‘less lethal’ projectile weapons against peaceful protestors and bystanders, gratuitously and without notice or warning and in order to intentionally retaliate against and inflict pain upon protestors challenging policing in our society.” The lawsuit seeks to end the MPD’s unconstitutional and punitive tactics of indiscriminately deploying less lethal weapons, including maiming projectiles, into crowds of persons engaged in First Amendment protected activities, in particular those challenging racist police violence. 

Five Suggestions For When State Repression Comes To Town

January 28, 2023 Lauren Regan, It's Going Down. , ,
CLDC has been providing movement aligned legal support to the campaigns and activists in the so called U.S. for over 20 years now.  In that time period, I have personally witnessed numerous waves of state repression targeting the campaigns that were moving the needle on the moral compass—anti-racism, environmental and animal defense, water and food safety, Indigenous sovereignty, LGBTQIA+, and others.  The state, whether government actors or big corporate profiteers, have a limited playbook that they tend to repeat over and over. This is why knowing your movement history is core to building resilience. History has demonstrated that when state repression comes to town it is often because your campaign is winning or demonstrating strength and the state elects to spend vast resources on derailing your momentum. 

Privacy Is The Entry Point For Our Civil And Basic Rights’

July 28, 2022 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. , , ,
From the outset, the gutting of Roe by Dobbs is so devastating for, of course, the constitutional reasons, that at one time, Roe codified and really affirmed that abortion was a basic right. Dobbs, in overruling that, overturning that, has laid open states to pick and choose whether they will allow abortion providers and individuals that kind of right. But we’re in a very different moment now in 2022 than we were in the 1970s, and that’s really because of the rise of the digital age. With it, as you mentioned in your opening, is that the Internet is our primary pathway for almost everyone, I think, to information, to healthcare to, you know, telehealth appointments. And so there are these huge questions now about how people will access both just information, and then who is going to have access to that data that we are all of us engaging in and creating a footprint for.

Supreme Court’s ‘Miranda’ Decision Further Guts Civil Rights Law

July 6, 2022 Reuters. , , ,
A U.S. Supreme Court decision on Thursday illustrated the extent to which the court has transformed a Reconstruction-era law meant to protect the rights of freed slaves and marginalized Americans into a formidable shield for the most powerful, including police, prosecutors and businesses. The June 23 decision bars lawsuits against police for using evidence obtained without advising people of their rights – the ‘Miranda’ warnings the court mandated nearly 60 years ago that have since become the framework through which most Americans understand their rights against police intrusion.

Miscarriage Of Justice Catalyzed A Movement Led By Asian Americans

June 26, 2022 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. , , ,
Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit in June 1982, by two white auto workers who reportedly said it was because of him that they had lost their jobs. At the time, listeners may recall, Japan was being widely blamed for the collapse of the Detroit auto industry. Chin was Chinese-American. Elite media, as reflected by the New York Times, didn’t seem to come around to the story until April 1983, with reporting on the protests emanating from Detroit’s Asian-American community about the dismissive legal response to the murder.

Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee Prepares For Demonstrations

October 17, 2021 Elise Brehob, Industrial Worker. , , ,
As 2021 comes to a close, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee is collaborating closely with Jailhouse Lawyers Speak as they organize collective actions inside prisons and jails from August 21 to September 9, 2022. These actions will include labor strikes, work equipment sabotage, sit-ins, boycotts and hunger strikes. The campaign, called “Shut ‘Em Down 2022,” plans to focus on locally organized actions driven by incarcerated people to meet their abilities and the demands of their specific facilities. IWOC is a committee of the Industrial Workers of the World. “When you’re incarcerated, human rights abuses are happening left and right because the mentality is that you are there as a punishment,” says Courtney Montoya, media liaison for IWOC and Jailhouse Lawyers Speak.

Bob Moses: Organizer And Civil Rights Pioneer

July 26, 2021 Peter Dreier, Portside. , , ,
At a time when voting rights are under assault, it is important to remember the legacy of Bob Moses, a brilliant community organizer who died on Saturday at age 86. Moses was a key architect of the movement to enlist Southern Black workers and sharecroppers to register to vote, a campaign that eventually pressured Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a momentous victory which the Republican Party has steadily sought to erode.

On Contact: Radical As Reality Itself

January 31, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Michael Smith about civil rights attorney Michael Ratner's recently published memoir, "Moving the Bar – My Life as A Radical Lawyer". Smith was a close friend and collaborator of Ratner's for over three decades. Michael Ratner was one of the most important civil rights attorneys in our era. He spent his life fighting on behalf of those who state and empire sought to crush, from the leaders of the prison uprising at Attica to Muslim prisoners held in Guantanamo, to Julian Assange.

We Need More Public Defenders To Become Judges

December 28, 2020 Brendon Woods and Emily Galvin Almanza, Business Insider. , , ,
As public defenders, it's been hard to watch the defacement of our federal courts by the Trump administration.  From the Supreme Court on down, the country's judicial benches are occupied by fewer people who have fought for compassion over cages. For every public defender on the federal bench, there are four former prosecutors —and the ratio is seven to one if you expand the comparison to lawyers who represented people instead of just lawyers who represented the government.  State and federal judicial posts are packed with individuals who have spent their careers defending corporate polluters, protecting big real estate, or filling our jails and prisons, leaving ordinary people looking for the protection of the courts out in the cold. 

Supreme Court Rules In Favor Of LGBTQ Rights

June 16, 2020 Bil Browning, LGBTQ Nation. , , ,
The Supreme Court just issued a landmark decision penned by Neil Gorsuch, a conservative justice appointed by President Donald J. Trump, deciding that “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII.” “Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” the decision reads. “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII.”

The Rest Of The World Sees Uprisings, Not Riots

June 9, 2020 By Reese Erlich, The Progressive. , , ,
U.S. officials, whether Democrat or Republican, pretend that only other countries violate human rights. Every year, the State Department issues a report on worldwide human rights with the heaviest criticism aimed at enemies du jour such as China, Russia, and Iran. Human rights, as defined by U.S. officials, include freedom of the press, maintaining an independent judiciary, and civil rights. But most of the world, the United Nations included, goes further, saying human rights include the right to a job, health care, and housing, among other things. Not surprisingly, U.S. leaders never mention authoritative international reports detailing U.S. human rights abuses. In 2017, the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights issued a report sharply criticizing U.S. human rights abuses.

Muslim Philanthropist Dr. Rafil Dhafir Released From Prison After 17 years

May 19, 2020 By Jack Cohen-Joppa, The Nuclear Resister. , , ,
On the morning of May 15, Dr. Rafil Dhafir was released to home confinement from the Allenwood federal prison in central Pennsylvania. The Iraqi-American physician who has worked internationally with Doctors Without Borders has been in federal prison since the day of his arrest more than 17 years ago in 2003, on the eve of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq. He was not due to be paroled from his 22-year sentence until November, 2021. Dhafir will now complete that term at his home near Syracuse, New York. A combination of factors described in the Bureau of Prisons (BoP) COVID-19 management plan added up to Rafil Dhafir’s eligibility for release now. Many of his supporters wrote to the warden following the March 26 memo from Attorney General William Barr to the Director of the BoP that outlined the plan.

Pandemic: Protecting Public Health And The Right To Free Speech And Assembly

May 16, 2020 By Norman Siegel and Steven Hyman, Law.com. , , ,
New Yorkers are allowed and encouraged to go out in the street with masks and stay at least 6 feet apart, as long as it is to stand in line to go shopping or to sit in a park, but if they are adhering to those requirements and they say something about an issue of public concern (similar to what members of Reclaim Pride did) that speech will make the speaker subject to arrest on the specious basis that speech is a public health risk. Banning that speech/protest while permitting the same activity without speech is unconstitutional. The president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association recently wrote to the police commissioner stating that: “This week the mayor announced an end to public protests in the city….the SBA believes that such a sweeping prohibition against the rights embodied by the First Amendment is glaringly unconstitutional.”

The Dangers Of COVID-19 Surveillance Proposals To The Future Of Protest

May 3, 2020 Matthew Guariglia, EFF.org. , , ,
Many of the new surveillance powers now sought by the government to address the COVID-19 crisis would harm our First Amendment rights for years to come. People will be chilled and deterred from speaking out, protesting in public places, and associating with like-minded advocates if they fear scrutiny from cameras, drones, face recognition, thermal imaging, and location trackers. It is all too easy for governments to redeploy the infrastructure of surveillance from pandemic containment to political spying. It won't be easy to get the government to suspend its newly acquired tech and surveillance powers. When this wave of the public health emergency is over and it becomes safe for most people to leave their homes, they may find a world with even more political debate than when they left it.
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