In this episode, we have the pleasure of continuing the conversation with the two fabulous guests we’ve been talking to about climate protest in the Netherlands, Germany, and beyond in our previous episode. One of our guests is Mirjam Hermann, a climate activist and law student. Our second guest is Juanita van Lunen, an attorney at The Hague working on criminal law and demonstration rights.

In this second part of our conversation, we continue discussing their experiences with climate protests, as well as their recommendations for how law students, lawyers, and the general public can get involved.

Key Highlights:

• Learn About Climate Protests: Learn about the fraught and controversial world of disruptive protests on climate change.
• First-Hand Experience: Explore the experiences of Juanita van Lunen and Mirjam Herrmann and legal advisors to protestors.
• Environmental Catastrophe: Understand the urgency which leads climate protestors to pursue increasingly disruptive forms of protest to demand action on climate change.
• Social Justice Issues: Gain a deeper understanding of the difficult balance which must be struck between the right to protest and the rights of others to go about their lives without undue disruption.
• Access to Justice: The discussion highlights the significant challenges in ensuring access to justice for climate protestors who have increasingly been criminalised, brutalised, and even cast as terrorists in their pursuit of climate justice.

About Our Guests:

• Juanita van Lunen is a criminal law attorney in the Hague, and specialises in demonstrations law. She regularly advises climate protestors, both before and during protests, and following arrest.
• Mirjam Herrmann is a law student and climate activist, and one of the first climate protestors in Germany to be imprisoned under anti-climate-protest laws. She is a member of the association Rückendeckung für eine aktive Zivilgesellschaft (RAZ) e.V., which provides legal and psychological support to Letzte Generation and other climate activist groups

Why Listen? This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in environmental justice, climate change, human rights, freedom of speech!

Call to Action:

• Stay tuned for our next podcast conversation: with Ashfaq Khalfan, Director of Climate Justice at Oxfam USA!
• Follow and share the Podcast to make sure you never miss an episode!
• Stay informed and take action by advocating for sustainable practices and supporting policies that protect our environment and human rights.
• Please visit https://raz-ev.org/unterstuetzen/ if you might want to help or support with a donation.

Mijam Herrmann and Juanita van Lunen – What to look out for with ongoing climate protests?

[00:00:00] Intro

[00:00:00] Dr Miranda Melcher: Hello and welcome to Just Access. Too many individuals and groups around the world today are denied access to justice. This access is vital for making human rights effective and securing human dignity, especially for those in situations of vulnerability, including women, children, minorities, migrants, or detainees.

[00:00:24] Through our podcast, we explore ideas about how to improve access to justice for all. Our motto is, everyone can be a human rights defender, and our goal with these conversations is to raise awareness about human rights issues. My name is Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I’m a senior legal fellow at Just Access and the host of this podcast.

[00:00:44] In this episode, I have the pleasure of continuing my conversation with two fabulous guests who I’ve been talking about climate protest in the Netherlands, Germany, and beyond in our previous episode. One of our guests is Mirjam Hermann, a climate activist and law [00:01:00] student. Our second guest is Juanita van Lunen, an attorney at The Hague working on criminal law and demonstration rights.

[00:01:08] In this second part of our conversation, we continue discussing their experiences with climate protests, as well as their recommendations for how law students, lawyers, and the general public can get involved.

[00:01:30] Interview – Part 2

[00:01:30] Dr Miranda Melcher: I wonder if I can ask you both, given your perspective very much on the ground of this, not at the more abstracted layer, for example, of like international law textbooks but really engaged with it in practice.

[00:01:44] Is there a particular case or a particular legal argument or a particular legal precedent that kind of strikes you as being really important, maybe right now or could be in the future, even if it’s not one you’ve been involved on, given your [00:02:00] perspective: ooh, that case was really important for this reason, or I’m really curious to see how this precedent Maybe could become a thing?

[00:02:07] Or here’s a trend that I’m keeping an eye on. Given how actively involved you both are, is there anything that comes to mind?

[00:02:15] Juanita van Lunen: Shall I respond to that? I already referred to it a little bit, but there are some cases in the Netherlands that are important to follow, one of them is the sedition case in which people asked other people to attend a demonstration on the highway and then a lot of those demonstrations went very well, very peaceful.

[00:02:37] Always the intention, of course, is a peaceful demonstration. But people got arrested for sedition and also convicted for that. So that is really interesting how that will go on in the higher appeal case, and I think it’s really wrong that they got convicted, especially because there is a right the blocking a highway is part of [00:03:00] your right to an act of freedom of assembly.

[00:03:02] That is one of the cases in the Netherlands. And like I said, also another case that, that is on the side of that is a preparation of block of the highway so that people try to block or intended to block the highway and then thought about how they would do that.

[00:03:21] And then before they actually could do that, they and for the same reason, I’ve also think it’s wrong that they got convicted and that it’s also something that’s going on now for the higher appeal in the Netherlands. So it’s very interesting to follow and I really think that it should that they all should be acquitted for this.

[00:03:38] Dr Miranda Melcher: Thank you for sharing those, Renita. I think lots of us will be watching those cases. Miriam, anything come to mind on this for you?

[00:03:46] Mirjam Herrmann: I don’t think there’s so much precedent we are building on, but we’re setting some precedent, I guess. I mean, there’s obviously those cases, they were decided by the highest criminal court and also the constitutional court [00:04:00] in like the 70s, 80s. more the 80s about like for against like peace activists that were demonstrating against atom nuclear weapons that were stationed in Germany and they also did roadblocks so a lot of roadblock is coercion precedent comes from that time And that was also decided that it can be violence to sit on the road.

[00:04:25] And that is something that we want to challenge before the constitutional court. But also some other things, for example, this I said before of if the climate content of the protest because of its constitutional role can be recognized in this weighing the rights of the people who do the assembly against the ones that are blocked in traffic and stuff like that.

[00:04:48] So what we’re doing is, we have thousands of cases before courts. We have at least five or 6, 000 cases, but we’ve already tried around 2000 in the first instance, with just [00:05:00] let’s say Letzte Generation people, and almost all of them are very similar constellation of roadblock. So what we’re trying to do now is that we compiled a group of lawyers from different areas that look at the most promising cases, and we decide which ones are strategically the best to bring before the constitutional courts, to try to set some precedent there that’s somehow good for us.

[00:05:24] And for demonstrations in the future, obviously and Yeah, a second big thing, I think, is that now several individuals from Letzte Generation have been charged with having formed a criminal organization. That works, because the law on criminal organizations in Germany, is broader than what this European directive saying that every European country should have a law like that suggested.

[00:05:52] So the European directive says if like people come together in an organized group to commit crime for their own [00:06:00] material benefit, they should be charged as a criminal organization. And Germany just leaves out the material benefit part so that political groups can also be charged with this. It has actually a long tradition from back in the day when democratic movements were challenging the feudal era and stuff like that.

[00:06:19] And what’s happening there is that this is the first time that a climate movement that does exclusively peaceful protests, of course, there has been like paint sprayed on stuff and stuff like that, but there’s never been violence against people and it’s the first time that a movement like that is faced with this indictment.

[00:06:40] And I think it’s incredibly dangerous because it has an immense chilling effect, because anyone who supports an organization that is found to be a criminal organization is also committing a criminal act with if we say the part of a climate movement is that, then we’re very [00:07:00] quickly at a point that someone who, I don’t know, uses a sticker of that movement somewhere, or passes out a flyer, or just passes on a donation link to someone, or maybe even climate movements work together, of course, and like groups and whatever.

[00:07:15] And then, oh, there has been, they’ve been working together. So now this is also criminal. And so people just in generally, in general, will get afraid of being part of climate justice activism in general because of this and that makes it so incredibly dangerous because there would always be the option for the German state to just go after people for the individual things they did, for example, like closing a pipeline on the emergency wheel, they could like, specifically go for disrupting public infrastructure, but they’re not doing that, but they’re going for the criminal organization. So that’s just a new case and it’s going to be very interesting what happens there. It’s going to be like a very long trial, at [00:08:00] least a year or so. And a lot of discussions and a lot of people involved.

[00:08:05] Dr Miranda Melcher: And some of the people involved and the discussions are public, right? The media is part of this. Public perception is part of this. Again, if we expand out who’s involved in this kind of thing. So I wonder if each of you can speak to what role the public attention or media coverage, what role does that play in your work?

[00:08:27] Mirjam, perhaps you want to continue where you left off?

[00:08:30] Mirjam Herrmann: Yes it’s immensely important. We always feel that when there’s public attention or outrage on too much repression, that actually the state might react to this. We had activists in custody for 30 days and preventative custody for 30 days in Bavaria once and there was so much outrage around this that the activists were let out earlier with some like lame excuse by the government there. And so stuff like that works. That’s the one side of the picture.

[00:08:58] And the second is that I think formats like this are also important and especially lawyers and law students and whatever also play an incredibly important role here and it’s really wrong to just pull back on this: okay, I’m just gonna be defending in the individual case and law shouldn’t be political because law is immensely political and what we’re observing right now, for example, is that with this criminal organization case it’s really difficult to make the public understand what the problem around this is.

[00:09:30] It’s really difficult to make the wider public understand, now they are charged with this, so that creates a chilling effect and they could also be charged with individual crimes and then it’s already, I don’t know, it’s not super difficult to explain, but it’s already too difficult for like mainstream media to just pick it up here and there.

[00:09:47] So what we’re noticing is that as soon as courts or even just prosecutors are involved somewhere, then a lot of people are like, okay, so now it’s just going in like the neutral, nice institutions and we don’t have to worry about it anymore, but that’s not the case. Like when these institutions can also be misused to suppress protests that are actually immensely important.

[00:10:09] And I recently had a meeting with Gina Romero, the new UN special rapporteur for freedom of assembly and association and we actually talked about she said that she’s observing that the the human rights activists are losing the fight over the narrative against more authoritarian and law and order groups.

[00:10:32] And that one really big problem in repression of activist groups and of protests is that media and the public is following these narratives of outrage that politicians put out there. It’s like this, oh, they are violent, they are eco terrorists, or in Germany they say they are the green RAF, which was a left terrorist group in the 70s.

[00:10:55] And we need like more like harder penalties and punishments for them and it needs to be quicker and you need to get off our roads because they’re violent against people and stuff like that. So this narrative is put out there and we are losing the fight of countering this right now. NGOs are all outraged.

[00:11:14] We have a lot of, we’re in contact with a lot of NGOs that are all thinking about, okay, what can we do? Maybe we can start a campaign here or there, but when I just look at the normal media and just random people that I talk to sometimes, they don’t really know about this and they don’t understand why human rights are so important and how some players in a lot of states right now in the entirety of the Western world, where we move more towards authoritarianism, are using the rule of law the rule of law as an argument against fundamental rights and rights of freedom.

[00:11:50] So they’re saying like the rule of law isn’t that’s, maybe that’s just the German thing, but they’re literally using the word Rechtsstaat, which means the rule of law to say okay, now [00:12:00] we need the full violence and the full hardness of the rule of law to counter these activists because they are disregarding law by blocking the road.

[00:12:09] So they’re really intent on getting some kind of criminal indictment and then they’re like, Oh, they’re breaking the law. So now we have to hit them with the full force of the law and completely reframing what rule of law actually means, namely that you can keep the state in check and that you can have instruments against the state and against repression and to keep your fundamental rights.

[00:12:33] And this is really worrying to me. And I think that the entire public, but especially lawyers and law students who know and have an understanding of what the rule of law actually should mean and how human rights works. It is like our shared, it’s our shared task right now. And it’s incredibly important that we really take that seriously and figure out ways how to do this to change the narrative again and to have more, more positive view of [00:13:00] human rights and to have human rights be something good again and something protected and not something that state needs to counter with the full force of the law.

[00:13:08] And so I think everyone is very important here and should take part in that discussion.

[00:13:14] Dr Miranda Melcher: That’s a really clear way in which the public is relevant in some of these discussions, especially in Germany. Juanita, what about for you? How does the public and media play into your work?

[00:13:26] Juanita van Lunen: So I also think it’s very important to inform the media about why for example, a decision is that someone doesn’t get a punishment or doesn’t get convicted. Many people think that when people don’t do what the police ask them to do directly or in another way breach a law they think they should just get a punishment for it and don’t understand why someone doesn’t. For example like I said, the case with the national met the battle that the people involved were convicted [00:14:00] without a punishment, many people don’t understand even though the painting itself didn’t get demolished.

[00:14:06] The certain important aspect, I think but it’s. It’s also up to us and up to others to explain why some one doesn’t get convicted for it and also why the protection of human rights, like the freedom of expression and the freedom of assembly are so important as a society.

[00:14:25] Yeah, that’s really important. I think that people know that and that we explain the wider public about this.

[00:14:33] Dr Miranda Melcher: That makes a lot of sense. And I’m wondering on that point of people knowing things and having things explained to them. Miriam spoke a moment ago about what some of the things are and I’ll ask for a bit more in a moment, Mirjam, about what law students and lawyers particularly maybe want to be taking away from this, but Juanita, I wonder if you have anything to recommend or advice you might give to law students or young lawyers who are passionate about helping with human rights and helping with demonstration [00:15:00] law.

[00:15:00] Do you have any advice of how they could get into or help with this kind of work?

[00:15:04] Juanita van Lunen: I think there are more lawyers that are specialized in human rights and also in demonstration law and so maybe go there and see what you can do there. I think especially in these times the human rights are really under threat, different kinds of human rights, so it’s really important to make sure they are protected.

[00:15:24] So I don’t have a specific advice, but there are more attorneys that are specialized in demonstration rights or other human rights. So that’s place to start. Yes.

[00:15:34] Dr Miranda Melcher: Yeah, no, exactly. That’s helpful. Mirjam, you spoke earlier about what law students and lawyers might want to pay attention to and the discussions they can get involved in. I wonder perhaps as a final word in today’s discussion at least, if you might have some ideas about how the general public, people who might not be lawyers or law students could support the legal rights of climate protesters more effectively.

[00:15:57] Mirjam Herrmann: I think one of the biggest things that the wider [00:16:00] public should do and needs to do is to understand the crisis we are in right now and to understand how much climate change and the catastrophe it bears will impact all our lives and the lives of our children and people in the global south already and to find ways that we can do something against that. And the more we are, the more people stand up because of this, and the more people say it can’t go on the way we’re doing it right now, the safer the people are that are on the front lines of the fight here, because this is about all of us. So that definitely is one of the things and that doesn’t mean that everyone has to sit on a road immediately or spray paint on a private jet.

[00:16:43] This already starts with demonstrations. This starts with educating others on this. This starts with talking about it in your families and so on. And also what I would also advise everyone to think about is that Yeah, [00:17:00] the system that we have that is so cool and has so many rights that are protected and so many freedoms and this modern society that has so many perks and privileges that we enjoy that this is fragile and that this is changing right now. And we see the move towards authoritarianism in so many countries. And we have to be alert about this. And it’s super dangerous to just follow frames that, I don’t know, populist parties give us. Or maybe even the governments right now of who is the terrorist or who are doing something bad or whatever.

[00:17:37] But it’s really time that we start thinking for ourselves and listening to the science and thinking about, okay, what is just to do right now in a situation where millions will die because of our consuming fossil fuels. Yeah, so I think it’s just literally time to wake up out of our stupor of this is too big, what can we do, and perceive ourselves as people [00:18:00] who can do something and who can at least try. Because if we look back at ourselves in 20 years, what will we think should we have done today?

[00:18:10] Outro

[00:18:11] Dr Miranda Melcher: What a fabulous way to end our conversation. Thank you so much, Mirjam, for finishing us off on that note, and Juanita as well for contributing your incredibly useful insights to our discussion. To listeners, thank you for joining us for the second part of this conversation. If you’re enjoying our podcast, Please tell your friends, like us and share us on social media.

[00:18:34] And please also rate us and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. We’d love to hear what you think and really do read all the reviews to understand what you like, maybe how we can improve and to get the word out about what we’re doing. You can also get in touch with us more directly with any comments, reflections, or suggestions for people or topics to cover by contacting us at podcast at just-access. de. That’s podcast at [00:19:00] just-access. de. Until next time.