Against the crossborder criminalisation of political activists!

Against the crossborder criminalisation of political activists!
For the abandonment of the police database society!

“We preventively arrested 148 protesters [...]. 96 anarchists were arrested, as they wanted to participate in the demonstration”
Brussels police spokesperson Christiqn De Coninck justifies the mass-arrests on the 29th of September

Once again hundreds of European activists from the No Border Camp in Brussels where arrested in the last week of September. On the one hand those vexatious arrests served as a denial of the basic right to protest. On the other hand these "preventive" measures also served to reinforce the digital control of social movements against the EU border regime. The affected people were only released after their identity had been checked and a picture of them had been taken. Those who tried to refuse this latter measure, were brutally forced to comply.

"Preventive" mass-arrests of activists from social movements have become quite common within the European Union over the last few years. The EU pursues its own research programs for the "handling" of protests at "mega events". Manuals advise the law enforcement agencies to have a high quota of people arrested, not to loose the sovereignty over all information as well as to exchange data on protesters before and after the demonstration. For this reason extensive questionnaires are being sent to all of the EU member states' police services.

Some countries already avail of databases for "troublemakers", which are regularly "lent" to other police services, also outside of the EU. There is no need to have been convicted to be filed into the "troublemaker"-database. The sole registering of ones identity around a police operation can lead to the future refusal of the right of entry or exit, for example during summit protests. After the successful national implementation in Germany, Denmark and other governments, they now demand the gathering of such data on the EU level.

It can be expected that also the preventive acquired information on persons gathered in Brussels (just as vehicle license plates or information on accommodation) will be used for subsequent discrimination of the affected. Data gathered such as lately in Brussels will probably be also fed into the planned EU database on "troublemakers".

Since years now activists fight against the repression of migrants and them being filed into ever new police EU databases. In the same manner we now demand the deletion of all acclaimed data of activists in connection with the No Border Camp.
We will further on be going onto the barricades against the establishment of a EU database on left political activists. We encourage people to reclaim their self-determination over personal data step by step via requests for information.

We are working on to provide request of information forms for Belgian police databases. For this please look out for announcements on the web page of the No Border Camp: http://noborderbxl.eu.org.
More information on possibilities of requests for information are available in the realms of the crossborder campaign "Reclaim Your Data" on this site: http://euro-data.noblogs.org. In German there are already template letters to German and EU police services available.