Protests at UN climate talks face a `shocking level of censorship'

Activists designated Saturday a day of protest at the COP28 summit in Dubai. But the rules of the game in the tightly controlled United Arab Emirates at the site supervised by the United Nations meant sharp restrictions on what demonstrators 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 the detention of activists — one from Egypt and two from the UAE — was not allowed to hold up signs bearing their names. A late afternoon demonstration of around 500 people, the largest seen at the climate conference, couldn't go beyond the U.N.-governed Blue Zone in this autocratic nation. And their calls for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip couldn't name the parties involved.

“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,” Joey Shea, a researcher at Human Rights Watch focused on the Emirates, told The Associated Press after their restricted demonstration.

Pro-Palestinian protesters who were calling for a cease-fire and climate justice were told they could not say “from the river to the sea,” a slogan prohibited by the U.N. over the days of COP28.

In the aftermath of a brutal Hamas attack on Israel in October and the subsequent Israeli bombing and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, that phrase has been used at pro-Palestinian rallies to call for single state on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Some Jews hear a clear demand for Israel's destruction in the call.

Protesters got around rules banning national flags by instead wearing keffiyeh scarves and holding signs depicting watermelons to show their support for the Palestinians.

Protestor Dylan Hamilton of Scotland said it remained important for demonstrators to cry out their grievances, even if they sounded like a cacophony of concerns ranging from climate change, the war or Indigenous rights.

“It's essential to remind negotiators what they are negotiating about,” Hamilton said. “It's trying to remind people to care about people you'll never meet.”

Despite the restrictions, activists protesting for a cease-fire in Gaza called the action historic due to its size.

“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,” climate activist Isavela Lopez said. “I'm here to say to end with the colonial powers and with the white supremacy.”

Many climate activists point to the same causes for today's climate crisis.

Typically, COP summits see mass demonstrations of tens of thousands of people outside of the Blue Zone. But given the UAE's rules, the only place where activists can protest is inside that U.N.controlled space, which has its own tight restrictions on speech.