Quakers in Britain are winding from what they say is the unheard of violation of one of their worship police officers who forced their way to the meeting house in London and arrest there to gather there to plan protests in Gaza.
“No one has been arrested in the Quaker Meeting house in Living Memory,” said Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, declaration Published after the raid.
But on Thursday evening, the pacifist group, more than 20 uniformed police officers, some armed with tasers, forced the way to the meeting house in Westminster and broke the open front door “without warning or ringing the bell”.
Officers searched the building and arrested six women at the Assembly for Youth, an unpruncated activist group that rented the room in which it met, Quakers said in Britain.
The Metropolitan Police said the arrest followed the demand plans for youth to “close” London protests next month, according to according to British media. The police said that while they have recognized the right to protest, “we have responsibility to intervene to prevent activities that will exceed the boundary before protest into serious disturbances and other crime,” British media reported.
Arrests aroused alarms in England and came in the middle an intervention against the protesters of war in Gaza In the United States, especially on university campuses, where some students condemned the prosecution of the war against Hamas.
Legal experts say that Trump’s administration pedaled the rights to freedom of expression and after the raid at the Quakers meeting house in Britain, they expressed similar concerns.
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“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and violent removal of young people who are held by a protest group clearly shows what happens when the company criminalizes protest,” Parker said.
In recent years, Britain has taken several measures to intervene against protests and provided the police new powers.
One of the measures, the Public Order Act 2023, was described UN Human Rights chief Volker Türk, as “deeply disturbing”. The law imposes “serious and disproportionate restrictions” to the right to peace assembly and criminalizes some forms of peace protest of the British, According to the UN.
Demand for youth said in declaration When the air raid came to discuss Gaza, the West Bank and the climate crisis in Quaker House and share plans for non -violent actions of civil resistance, which he scheduled for next month.
According to the group, the activists have been said to have been detained in suspicion of “plot to cause public inconvenience”. The next day other activists from the group were arrested.
The youth demand on Sunday said that “she had not yet had the whole picture”, but it seemed that about 10 arrests were carried out on Thursday and Friday and 11 activists were attacked. All activists were released and none were charged, the group said.
The demand for youth, calling on the British government to stop all trade with Israel and get money from the rich to pay the environmental damage caused by fossil fuel combustion last year. While relatively small, some of its protests created subtitles.
In April, the group hung a banner and organized children’s shoes outside the home leader Keir Starmer before becoming prime minister. “Stop killing” in Gaza, read the banner.
In a statement after the raid the group called “Young people to go to the streets day after day and close London.”
Ella Grace-Taylor, 20 years old, a student of an acting-music who was arrested on Thursday in the House of Meeting, she said in video After her release that the group “will not be discouraged”.
“We’ll let us drive, because we know it means we’re winning,” she said. “It means that the government, that the police are afraid of us, that it recognizes the power we have.”
The metropolitan police did not answer immediately to the request for comment.
