COVID 19 one more reason to free the refugees (and defend the right to protest)

COVID 19 one more reason to free the refugees (and defend the right to protest)
over 5 years in greenleft

Anti-racism
Healthcare
Refugees & migrants

Kamala Emanuel

Issue
1265

Australia

COVID-19
refugee rights
Kangaroo Point detainees

Brisbane

May 15, 2020

I’ve just come home from a collective action to free the refugees detained in a hotel at Kangaroo Point, Brisbane.

It’s the latest of a series of weekly actions in solidarity with refugees protesting for their freedom. Each action has been organised in a way to try to comply with social distancing regulations in place for the covid-19 pandemic.

Like most of the actions, this one was an exercise action: participants walked, jogged or cycled around the block. Participants were urged to keep a healthy distance from one another.

I was carrying a sign, saying “Covid-19: just one more reason to free the refugees” and doing my best to walk the rather wobbly line-of-greatest-distance between myself, other participants and the health-insensitive aggregations of police.

I was approached by members of the police and told I couldn’t carry the sign while exercising, and instructed to leave. When I returned around the block, they insisted on stopping me, told me they would send me an infringement notice and asked if there was any emergent reason why I should be allowed to stay. They asserted that a magistrate had found in court today that protesting was against the chief medical officer’s orders and therefore illegal.

I told them I needed to stay to call for freedom for the detained refugees and their health, and didn’t want to think health regulations (which I agree with in principle) would be used to stifle political protest, when we in general and I in particular were not doing anything to put anyone’s health at risk. In fact, I’d had to insist repeatedly that the police allow me to step back from them so I could keep my safe distance (which they’d repeatedly ignored, stepping into my healthy-distanced personal space).

I’m a doctor, and I have been taking precautions while at work and while away from work, strongly driven by a wish not to get infected, so I can keep working (and so I wouldn’t infect my patients by working without realising I was infected.)

They told me they were going to take me to the watch house and took me away in the back of the police wagon. Instead, they released me to a nearby train station, just saying there had been a change of plan.

What was crystal clear from the incident I experienced was that the covid-19 pandemic is being used as an excuse to give the police greater powers, not commensurate with the response needed to deal with the public health emergency. The way the police clustered together, themselves not observing safe physical distancing, and the way they repeatedly violated safe physical distancing with members of the public made it obvious their policing was not informed by good science, just by removal of restrictions on their power. Permitting walking around the block as exercise, but not as exercising the democratic freedom of political communication, makes no sense at all from a public health perspective.

As fascism comes in flags blazing in some countries, and by stealth elsewhere, we should resist efforts to close down free speech and freedom of political assembly that aren’t in keeping with other measures that are being taken to slow the spread of SARS-CoV2.

I’ve been let go, but the refugees and people seeking asylum are still arbitrarily and indefinitely detained. I am only more determined than ever to build the ranks of those who say: we won’t stop till we free the refugees, and I hope others feel the same way.

Kamala Emanuel harassed by police for holding a sign. Photo: Alex Bainbridge