XR Justice Now! rejects the way the Dutch government wrongly criminalizes movements and individuals who stand up against injustice

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Last Friday, ministers Van Weel and Faber decided to ban Mohammed Khatib, who was supposed to give a lecture at Radboud University, from the Netherlands. Without proper legal grounds: a government may not simply deny someone access to the country out of fear of what they will say during a lecture. This is censorship and an infringement of the right to free assembly and expression.

Khatib speaks on behalf of Samidoun, an organization that advocates for the liberation of Palestinian political prisoners. The government has been trying to label Samidoun as a ‘terrorist’ organization for some time, while Samidoun focuses on educating people about the Palestinian resistance movement, providing information, and advocating for the release of political prisoners in Palestine. This provides absolutely no grounds for the government to assume a threat to national security. It’s a clear attempt to silence the movement for a free Palestine by abusing terrorism legislation.

Sights of the right

In the fight for justice it is of critical importance that the perspectives of precisely those who are being oppressed are allowed to have a voice in public discourse. But we see that attempts to criminalize, and thereby silence movements that fight for justice go beyond the Palestine movement. The climate movement is also in the sights of the (far) right-wing coalition in Europe.

In 2022, members of parliament Wilders and Markuszower already asked whether the Minister of Justice was prepared to designate Extinction Rebellion (XR) as a terrorist organization. And in Germany, the public prosecutor is investigating whether the climate movement Letzte Generation can be classified as a criminal organization. The BBB in the Netherlands suggested doing the same with XR. And that while their forms of protest are exclusively peaceful. In the UK, climate activists have been jailed for years for undertaking non-violent protests. Here too, we see that legislation designed for serious crime and terrorism is being abused to silence the movement for a just and wise climate policy.

We must stand up for justice

Gina Romero, Special Rapporteur of the UN on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, warns about this development. “Instead of addressing the compounding crisis and needs of society,” she writes, “authorities have weaponized stigmatizing narratives to silence critical voices.”

We call on everyone not to succumb to this repression. It has never been more urgent to stand up for justice, to do the right thing and to stick up for those who are oppressed, those who are being murdered, imprisoned on political grounds, exploited, and those who suffer most under the colonial and capitalist systems that are destroying our planet.

We demand that the Dutch government revoke their decision to ban Khatib and that they stop criminalizing Samidoun. We call on opposition parties to speak out more forcefully against the stigmatization of movements that stand for justice and decolonization.

In the fight for justice, we stand side by side. We only want justice, and we want it now!