Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

United campaign needed Urgent: fight now to defend civil liberties!

Socialist Resistance no28  |  page 3

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

There are now several campaigns or initiatives around the

urgent issue of defending civil

liberties against the current

broad assault in Britain, which

is of course part of a

European-wide and worldwide pattern.

So what is happening in

terms of resistance to the

central attacks in Britain via anti-terrorism legislation (which are of course linked with asylum and immigration legislation amongst others)?

Since 2000 the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) has been working in an alliance of the Haldane Society and other lawyers, members of affected communities, such as Kurds, Sikhs, Andrew Wiarc Tamils and Kashmiris, with Liberty and various other NGO's and activists to expose and oppose anti-terrorism legislation, starting with the Terrorism Act 2000, and to work for the repeal of this legislation.

CAMPACC provides briefing material to its members, MP's and lawyers and to the general public, and periodically organises public meetings and protests.

On Saturday 3 September CAMPACC held a picket outside Downing Street to protest at the re-arrest of 10 men, some previously held in Belmarsh and elsewhere and then released under control orders, whom the government intends to deport, without charge or trial, to countries where torture is practiced.

The protest was attended by about a hundred people, but was supported by a wide range of organizations and individuals, from the Green Party and Respect to Liberty, Stop Political Terror, Newham Monitoring Project, Stop the War Coalition, Statewatch, the Muslim Parliament and the Catholic peace group Pax Christie.

In the last month a new initiative called "Protect our Rights" has been launched by leading campaigning groups, community groups, some

a broad campaign in detence

of our rights given its political

complexion.

Fourthly, Stop the War

Coalition has called what it hopes will be a large demonstration on September 24 with the slogans "Stop the Bombing,

"Bring the Troops Home", "Defend Civil Liverties", "Defend the Muslim Community" and "No Deportations". Socialist Resistance welcomes the timely calling of this demonstration, very important in the aftermath of the tube bombings. But we do not believe that SW Coalition as a largely single issue campaign around stopping the war can be the organisation around which can be built the broad democratic and inclusive campaign which we believe is needed to confront the attacks on civil liberties which are under way, in which many people who are not necessarily against the war or for pulling the troops out may participate.

Socialist Resistance calls for a broad united campaign in defence of civil rights. It is not clear how such a campaign can emerge from the current initiatives, though possibly it might be through Protect our Rights with continued input from the more specialized CAMPACC and STW.

Meanwhile we call for socialists to affilllate to all the tree campaigns where possible, and to help build the demonstration on September 24. We shall continue to work with CAMPACC, and encourage comrades also to work with Protect Our Rights. For more information on CAMPACC see link from SR website.