On 6 April 2022, a group of activists from Rebelión Científica, many of them professionally linked to the academic world, threw biodegradable red paint made from common kitchen ingredients onto the façade of the Spanish Congress of Deputies. It was a symbolic protest that sought to draw attention to the climate inaction that our societies are demonstrating. If it is not reversed, it could lead us to very dangerous scenarios, as the best scientific evidence confirms and as our daily experience already anticipates: proliferation of extreme climate phenomena with a high impact on human and economic losses, public health effects, intense degradation of the material conditions of the vast majority of the population in large swathes of the planet, new forms of inequality and a very notable acceleration of social and geopolitical conflicts. As a result of this action, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has requested 21 months imprisonment for 15 defendants, as well as the payment of a fine amounting to more than 2592 euros for the State and 713 euros for the Madrid City Council.
We find morally intolerable and politically disturbing the contrast between the gravity of the ongoing climate situation, the innocuousness of the form of protest chosen by the science activists and the disproportionate repressive zeal that the state is demonstrating in this case. It is important to note that the effects of this civil disobedience action on the heritage of the Congress were nil, as the product was specially designed to be easily cleaned. In less than half an hour, the image of the Congress building had completely returned to normal. Given the magnitude of what is at stake with the climate crisis and the degree of violence it will inflict on millions of people, it is sociologically surprising that the social response to climate inaction remains so civilised.
For all these reasons, regardless of any consideration of the organisational form and political suitability of this specific protest and its execution, which we will not go into here, we at the Observatory of Eco-social Transition wish to declare our support for the defendants on the basis of three considerations:
-Climate protest, in its many forms, is not only legitimate but essential if the climate crisis is to be addressed from a transformative perspective, which will necessarily generate conflict and therefore friction and resistance to change between different vested interests.
-Conflict and protest are inherent elements of a pluralistic democracy. To repress in such a disproportionate way a harmless symbolic protest action is a further step in the democratic regression of our societies, which must be clearly denounced and framed in a context of a very dangerous deterioration of freedoms and political and social rights.
-The excessive repressive behaviour that we tolerate today will become the pattern of normality in the future. In years where conflict driven by socio-environmental and climate conflicts can only increase, it is important to prevent the consolidation of abusive repressive experiments, which set precedents that contribute to the legal criminalisation and political stifling of the expression of climate discontent and unrest.
In view of the above, we ask the Prosecutor’s Office to immediately drop all charges. And we urge the government of Spain to be consistent with the spirit of the Declaration of Climate Emergency approved in the Council of Ministers on 20 January 2020, using the tools of the State not to repress the most advanced and daring part of civil society in the fight against climate change, but to deploy an ambitious and just ecological transition that is up to the serious challenges of the 21st century.
