Deescalation is Order of the Day
Regarding the protests against the G20 summit and the respective handling of the Hamburg police leadership DIE LINKE party chair Katja Kipping declares:
Police leadership and who is politically responsible in Hamburg finally need to figure out a strategy of deescalation instead of constantly criminalise the justified and peaceful protest against the G20 summit and to prevent it by all means. It is simply going against basic rights anchored in fundamental law when peaceful protesters are attacked by water cannons, pepper spray or physical force even beyond the already questionable protest prohibition zone.
Yesterday's police intervention escalated the situation. Apparently, police leadership did everthing to create those images by which they justified their martial actions and the exorbitant restriction of the right to protest up to a prohibition to sleep from the beginning. It thereby approved of people coming to grieve who did not want anything else but to express their political opinion.
The great majority of protesters reacted calmly to policy activity and insisted on taking its right for demonstration. Single groups, thinking they could randomly destroy things, did a disservice to the justified causes of protests against the G20 summit. We sharply criticise these actions.
DIE LINKE further decisively fights for the safeguarding of democractic basic rights. Today and tomorrow, we are with the people which express their protest peacefully and without violent. Demonstrations and peaceful protest are the elixir of life of a lively democracy. Who tries to render this impossible, as it happened in Hamburg, endangers the free and democratic basic order.