Friday, 22 January 2010 Down with the courts and all prisons! Solidarity with the comrades in Lisbon!

On the 22nd of january, the trial of the arrested at the anti-authoritarian demo of 25th of April of 2007, began.

The trial takes place at the Campus de Justiça of Lisbon, a building block of about 10 buildings where all the courts of the city are concentrated. A place with all the worst things of progress: surveillance cameras on each corner and where the architecture is the opposite of communication among people, gathering, joy and rebelliousness.

In the course of the audience the defendants were identified and the accusation was read out.

Before and during the session there were leaflets handed out..

Throughout the audience some comrades gathered outside the court with a banner reading "Today as yesterday We continue on the streets Against all authority", and shouted words of solidarity, as "Freedom is in our hearts, Down with the courts and all prisons."

TEXT OF LEAFLET HANDED OUT OUTSIDE THE COURT

On the 25th of April 2007 happened in Lisbon an anti-authoritarian demo against fascism and capitalism. Close to 500 people took part on a march through one of the city’s richest areas, where paint was thrown at shops, banks and a riot cop van and slogans were spray painted on walls. To this shamelessness the guards of democratic order replied with a police charge and beatings against the demonstrators and everyone who were passing-by. As a result of this charge and of a few Hollywood-style chases throughout the city centre 11 individuals were arrested, charged among other things with insults and assaults on police officers. On the 22^nd of January 2010 the trial is due to begin, at the court Campus de Justiça de Lisboa.

Two years later, this incident comes to court; such a fact doesn’t surprise us nor should it surprise anyone, Justice delays but it doesn´t forget, nor is it supposed to forget, that´s its role, the role of never letting us forget that there’s always someone above us that has control over our lives. It can be a cop with a baton or someone in a gown with a little hammer. And it doesn’t stop here, it goes on with the military occupation of neighborhoods by the police, the deportation of immigrants, the intimidation of kids in the high schools looking for snitches, the surveillance cameras everywhere, the active role by the journalists paving the way for repression and the each day stronger call for everyone to snitch on each other, making us cops of others and of ourselves.

But this is what pops up in front of our eyes, day by day; then we have all the other things that we can only feel, that kill us without wounding us: the obligation of tasks and routines that are not of our choice and that rob us of our time and dry us inside; the flooding of images and sounds and relations that make it hard to breath even in the open air; the crushing daily survival in a society that is more and more an open air prison.

We know that the real point is more than a few damaged windows and offended cops. It is the attempt to grab the totality of life and of using all the tools we want in the struggle against a social order that consumes and destroys individuals, our relationships and the world we inhabit. It is precisely because this democratic order can not tolerate all the beautiful and wild things and people that still exist that in the last few years we´ve seen and felt a growing criminalization in the media, and the persecution by the forces of repression, of many of our and others’ actions and daily activities.

In the struggle for the liberation of our lives, we know who our comrades are and who are our enemies, and we go on finding all the others with whom we can meet in the joy of revolt, in the refusal of a controlled and manipulated life, where the will to live is greater than the comfort of a miserable survival.

A few anarchists