Police detain 200 in crackdown on climate protest

DANISH police outnumbered protesters yesterday, detaining more than 200 people on a second day of demonstrations, as environment ministers met for informal talks to advance negotiations on a new pact.

Meanwhile, church bells in Denmark and other countries rang 350 times, a number that refers to what many scientists consider a safe level of carbon dioxide in the air.

Police stopped an unauthorised demonstration headed toward the city’s harbour and carried out a security check, Copenhagen police spokesman Flemming Steen Munch told reporters.

The hundreds of demonstrators were outnumbered by police officers in riot gear who surrounded them. Steen Munch said police found bolt-cutters and gas masks when they searched a truck that led the demonstration. At least 200 activists were detained, he said.

A day earlier, police had detained nearly 1,000 activists at the tail end of a 40,000-strong march toward the suburban conference centre where the 192-nation UN climate conference is being held.

The detainees were from a range of European countries as well as the US, Kenya, Belarus, Japan, Mongolia, China and Turkey, police said. Only 13 of them remained in custody yesterday. Of those, three – two Danes and a Frenchman – were to be arraigned on preliminary charges of fighting with police.

Police said they detained the activists when some of them started breaking windows of buildings in downtown Copenhagen.

Critics blasted the Danish law that allows police to make preventative arrests if they believe a demonstration will turn violent and hold suspected troublemakers for up to 12 hours without a court arraignment.

“They have arrested 1,000 people. And they only followed up on three of them,” Amnesty spokeswoman Ida Thuesen said. “There are lot of people who haven’t done anything and had no intention of doing anything.”

The conference took a day off yesterday, though more than 40 environment ministers and other high-level negotiators were meeting for informal talks at the Danish Foreign Ministry on greenhouse emissions cuts and financing for poor nations to deal with climate change. The pledges on emissions cuts so far are short of the minimum proposed in a draft agreement to keep temperatures from rising to a dangerous level.

Also yesterday, Christian leaders from around the world took part in an ecumenical service dedicated to climate change, led by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams at Copenhagen’s Lutheran cathedral.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa joined church leaders from Tuvalu, Zambia, Mexico, Greenland and Denmark to warn about the dangers of a warming world. They carried symbols of climate change, a glacier stone from Greenland and bleached corals from the Pacific Ocean. Reverend Suzanne Matale of Zambia held up a dried-up cob of corn. After the service the church bells sounded 350 times in a campaign to draw attention to global warming. The National Council of Churches in Denmark says Christian churches in Denmark and across the globe were part of the campaign, from Fiji in the South Pacific to the US and Canada.

The EU, Japan and Australia joined the US in criticising the draft global warming pact that says major developing nations must rein in greenhouse gases, but only if they have outside financing. Rich nations want developing nations to limit emissions, with or without financial help.