New York protesters demand freedom for hunger strikers, G4S out of Standing Rock and Palestine

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Activists in New York City protested outside the offices of international British-Danish security corporation G4S in Manhattan on Friday, 4 November, denouncing the company’s role in occupied Palestine and in Standing Rock, where Native land and water defenders are resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

dsc_0083Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network protested outside the G4S offices, highlighting the cases of hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners and demanding their immediate release and the abolition of administrative detention. Over 700 Palestinians are imprisoned without charge or trial under Israeli administrative detention; administrative detention orders are based on so-called “secret evidence” and are indefinitely renewable for one- to six-month periods. Currently, Ahmad Abu Fara, 29, and Anas Shadid, 19, are on hunger strike for their 45th day demanding their release from administrative detention; they have been imprisoned without charge or trial since August.

dsc_0156G4S provides security systems, control rooms and equipment to the Israeli Prison Service as well as Israeli checkpoints, police training centers and even the Beit Hanoun/Erez crossing where the siege is enforced on Gaza. They are subject to a global call for boycott and have lost contracts internationally due to their involvement in human rights violations in Palestine, as well as their role in youth imprisonment and migrant detention and deportation in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and elsewhere.

dsc_0088In the United States, G4S has been implicated alongside other private security corporations in providing aggressive security to the corporations seeking to build the Dakota Access Pipeline, threatening the land, sacred spaces and water of the Standing Rock Sioux. Indigenous protesters and their supporters have gathered in Standing Rock to defend the land and water and resist the pipeline’s construction.

During the protest, demonstrators would march through the building in pairs, chanting loudly for G4S to get out of Palestine and Standing Rock and stop profiting from oppression and settler colonialism.

samidoun3Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network will protest again on Friday, 11 November outside the offices of G4S, highlighting the security corporation’s role not only in Standing Rock and Palestine, but also in suppression of the uprising in Charlotte, North Carolina, where a private, G4S run “company police” force, the Charlotte Area Transit System Police, operate alongside the racist, lethal cops who killed Keith Scott. Protesters will gather at 4 pm outside G4S’ offices at 19 W. 44th Street to demand the corporation end its complicity in racist state violence before marching at 5:30 pm to Times Square.

Photos by Adnan Farsakh