The Quaccheri in Great Britain are recovering from what they say is an unprecedented violation of one of their places of worship by the police officers who made their way in a meeting house in London and the arrested activists gathered there to plan the protests of the Gaza war.
“Nobody was arrested in a Quaker meeting house in the living memory,” said Paul Parker, employed for the Quaccheri in Great Britain, in a statement released after the Raid.
But on Thursday evening, the pacifist group said that more than 20 police officers in uniform, some armed by Taser, made their way to the meeting house in Westminster, I open the entrance door “without notice or playing the bell”.
The officers searched the building and arrested six women during a request for a request for youth, a group of non -affiliate activists who was renting a room to meet, said the Quaccheri in Great Britain.
The Metropolitan Police said that the arrests followed the plans of the demand for young people to “close” London with protests next month, according to the British media. The police said that while they recognized the right to protest, “we have the responsibility to intervene to prevent the activity that crosses the line from the protest to serious interruptions and other crime”, reported British Media.
The arrests launched alarms in England and arrived in the midst of a repression of the demonstrators of the Gaza war in the United States, in particular on the university campuses, where some students denounced the pursuit of Israel against the war against Hamas.
Legal experts say that the Trump administration has trampled on the rights of freedom of speech and, after the raid in the meeting house, the Quaccheri in Great Britain expressed similar concerns.
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“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the strong removal of young people who hold a group of protest group clearly shows what happens when a society criminalizes the protest,” said Parker.
In recent years, Great Britain has implemented several measures to repress protests and has granted new powers to the police.
One of the measures, Public Order Act 2023, was described by the United Nations Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, as “deeply worrying”. The law requires “serious and undue restrictions” on the law of the peaceful assembly and criminalize some forms of peaceful protest by the British, according to the United Nations.
The request of young people declared in a declaration that when the Raid took place, was making a “welcome speech” to the Quaker house to discuss Gaza, the West Bank and the climatic crisis and to share non -violent actions of civil resistance that has scheduled for next month.
Activists were told that they had been arrested with suspicions of “conspiracy to cause public discomfort”, according to the group. Other group activists were arrested the next day, he said.
The request of the young people said in one and -mil on Sunday that did not yet have the complete picture “, but that it seemed that about 10 arrests were carried out on Thursday and Friday and that 11 activists houses were raided. All activists have been released and no one was accused, the group said.
The youthful question, which invites the British government to stop all the trade with Israel and raise funds from the rich to pay environmental damage from the combustion of fossil fuels, was started last year. Although relatively small, some of his protests have generated titles.
In April, the group hung a banner and put in line the children’s shoes outside the home of the Labor leader, Keir Starmer, before becoming prime minister. “Stop the Killing” in Gaza, the banner played.
In a statement after the raid, the group He invited “young people to take the roads day after day and close London”.
Ella Grace-Taylor, 20 years old, a musician actor student who was arrested on Thursday at the meeting house, he said in a video after his liberation that the group “will not be discouraged”.
“We will let this feed us because we know this means that we are winning,” he said. “It means that the government, that the police, that the state is afraid of us, who recognize the power we have”.
The metropolitan police did not immediately respond to a commentary request.