WHILE activists designated Saturday a day of protest at the 28th United Nations Conference of the Parties (Cop28) summit in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai, authorities sharply restricted what protesters could say, where they could walk and what their signs could portray.
At times, the controls bordered on the absurd.
A small group of demonstrators protesting against the detention of two pro-democracy activists, Emirati Ahmed Mansoor and Egyptian Alaa Abdel-Fattah, were not allowed to hold up signs bearing their names.
A late Saturday afternoon demonstration of about 500 people, the largest seen at the climate conference, couldn’t go beyond the UN-governed blue zone in the autocratic UAE.
Calls by activists for a ceasefire in the carnage taking place against the Palestinians in Gaza couldn’t name the parties involved in the fighting.
Joey Shea, a researcher at Human Rights Watch focused on the Emirates, said: “It is a shocking level of censorship in a space that had been guaranteed to have basic freedoms protected like freedom of expression, assembly and association.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters who were calling for a ceasefire and climate justice were told they could not say “from the river to the sea,” a slogan prohibited by the UN over the days of Cop28.
The phrase has been used at pro-Palestinian rallies to refer to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
Some claim that the phrase is anti-semitic because they believe it implies the destruction of Israel.
But protesters using the slogan have often denied this accusation.
Activists got around rules banning national flags by instead wearing keffiyeh scarves and holding signs depicting watermelons to show their support for the Palestinians.
Climate activist Isavela Lopez said: “I don’t want to look back one day where a Palestinian can’t remember what their history and their culture used to look like, because that’s exactly what happened to us in Mexico.”
Protesters also briefly staged a sit-in at the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries stand over a leaked letter reportedly calling on cartel member states to reject any attempt to include a phase-down of fossil fuels in any text at the summit.
Campaigner Nicholas Haeringer said: “It’s like having a convention on fighting the tobacco industry and having the tobacco industry present in a negotiation.
“It’s like having a fox in the hen house. And to be honest with you guys, I think at some point we will run out of analogies before these guys run out of oil.”
