The Article 11 Trust will be having its official launch on Thursday 8th April 2021. We will be joined by Adam Elliott-Cooper, Lyndsay Burtonshaw and Kevin Blowe to discuss why defending the right to protest matters.
The Article 11 Trust was set up because we knew there were major threats to protest rights on the horizon. But none of us could have predicted this past year and the situation we are now facing.
We know that the shrinking space for protest often falls hardest on groups that face discrimination. We saw this in the heavy-handed policing of the Black Lives Matter demos in July, as well as the vigil for Sarah Everard in Clapham earlier this month.
The policy changes proposed by the Home Office have huge implications for protest rights. They seek to lower the threshold for shutting down demos and undertaking mass arrests, and codify more covert surveillance and monitoring of activists.
Protest rights are human rights & we must defend them. To find out more information and book your place visit our event page.
Speakers
Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper is an academic at the University of Greenwhich. He has previously worked as a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at UCL, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and as a research associate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence, and on the board of Black Lives Matter UK. Adam wrote the report Britain is Not Innocent – an analysis of the heavy-handed policing of the UK Black Lives Matter movement in summer 2020, which was published in partnership with Netpol & the Article 11 Trust.
Lyndsay Burtonshaw is a facilitator-activist. After growing up with zero political awareness in a working class household, Lyndsay has spent the last decade involved in direct action movements resisting white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, including Occupy against privatisations at Sussex Uni. In 2017, they and 14 others blocked a racist Home Office deportation flight at Stansted airport. Lyndsay works with Turning The Tide (Quaker Peace and Social Witness), Navigate and Beautiful Trouble UK, specialising in sustainable resistance/recovering from burnout, anti-oppression, and creative resistance.
Kevin Blowe is the coordinator of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol). For 25 years he was a campaigner for the Newham Monitoring Project, an east London police monitoring group. Extensive experience in charity management includes leading the Community Involvement Unit in Newham, which provided capacity building for local community groups. He is also a trustee of the Inquest Charitable Trust and the Buwan Kothi International Trust.
Additional speakers TBC.