Protesters beaten up, NGOs excluded

Avaaz, Friends of the Earth International, Via Campesina and maybe others were banned from the COP15 conference this morning. The excuse was actions they had held inside the conference centre. These non-violent actions are quite common during climate conferences and had been allowed in Copenhagen since the first day of the conference. Today's decision took everyone by surprise.

Later on, civil society delegates walked out of the conference to join the 'People's Assembly' that was scheduled to take place outside the conference centre. We were stopped on a bridge by the police and were prevented from joining the Assembly. The police first said that there was violence and arrests on the other side of the fence and they would let us go once this was over .

Soon we figured out there was nothing going on the other side of the fence at this moment - we could see there were only peaceful demonstrators watching us. With a hand vote we decided to peacefully push forward with our hands in the air. The police used truncheons immediately. We chanted 'we are peaceful what you are?'. After some time of pushing the police forced us to leave beating us with truncheons . Fortunately, nobody was seriously hurt.

Police used pepper spray and arrested some hundreds of protesters marching to the conference
despite the fact that their protest was entirely peaceful. They also confiscated the truck in which the People's Assembly was supposed to take place and this happened out in the cold.

After the walk out event we were informed by the police that all NGOs (environmental, research, business etc.) have been excluded for the rest of the day at least and maybe also tomorrow .

The UNFCCC secreteriat had previously shared the limited NGO positions for the plenary in an untransparent way. Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) were given 25% of passes, around 23% to 'Business NGOs' BINGOs, 20% to Research institutions (RINGOs). There is no official categorisation of which delegations belong to which of the above categories, so it is completely
opaque on what basis this share was made.

It would be interesting to see whether the common 'high-level breakfast' of UNFCCC with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development will take place tomorrow.