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At Paris talks – a megaphone for corporations a muzzle for social movements

Naomi Klein criticises protest restrictions at Paris climate talks Activist says authorities have ‘handed a megaphone to the corporations and taken the megaphone away from the social movements’, Guardian,  Emma Howard , 6 Dec 15 French authorities are enforcing “unprecedented restrictions on civil society” at the UN climate change talks in Paris, the author and activist Naomi Klein has said.

Klein said the ongoing talks were a victim of austerity as the French government had failed to provide adequate state funding, leading to heavy sponsorship by corporations. Meanwhile authorities have imposed a ban on mass protests around COP21, as the conference is known, in the wake of last month’s terror attacks in Paris.

“We have got unprecedented restrictions on civil society – they’ve handed a megaphone to the corporations and taken the megaphone away from the social movements,” Klein said. “It’s a combination of the role of corporations inside the COP and the banning of protests outside.

“We always knew that this was going to be the most corporate-sponsored COP, it’s a victim of austerity … You should at least be able to have a dialogue between the corporate solutions and the popular solutions, but only one side of the debate is being given a megaphone and the other side is being hauled out or banned.”

Activists have found creative ways around the ban on mass gatherings, with 10,000 pairs of shoes laid out where a climate march should have started and a human chain running past the Bataclan concert venue where 90 people died. But police have arrested protesters who they suspect will flout the ban, and hundreds of anti-capitalist protesters were kettled by police last Sunday.

On Friday police were seen carrying protesters from the opening of Solutions 21, an exhibition for businesses to showcase their proposals for tackling climate change, according to reports by New Internationalist and Climate Hom…… http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/06/naomi-klein-criticises-protest-restrictions-at-paris-climate-talks

December 7, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general