Freedom Not Fear 2008/Call for participation

Aus Freiheit statt Angst!

Version vom 09:13, 2. Jul. 2008

Calls for Participation, aiming at different target groups.

Ecomenical organisations

Dear ...,

on 11. October 2008, human and civil rights organizations from all over Europe, are planning parallel protests in every european capital. This trans-european campaign is aiming at a sensitization for the need of freedom and democracy and and is a protest against the extension of the security sector against human rights by means like mass-surveillance, data retention and biometric databases all over Europe.

We believe, that the retention of the communication of all citizens violate basic human rights, like the right for private rooms and private communication. It violates the safe space for confession as well as the confidential communication between journalists and their sources, doctors and patients, lawyers and clients. It does not increase the success of crime investigation, but can be used to reveal political, business- and private networks and endangers the work of political, development aid and refugees support groups.

We would kindly ask you to support this Europe wide and broad protest by disseminating the call for action to your own members (-organizations) and other like-minded organizations. In a lot of European countries, organizational, logistic and financial support is very welcome!

• The goal is to form broad and sustainable movements in every EU-member state for freedom and democracy.*

And we would like to see hundreds of thousands of people everywhere to stand up for the vision of a just society.

The European Call for Action will follow soon. Actually, we are working on it in an open process, so you are invited to participate.[3]

We would also be happy if you and your national member organizations are kindly would sign and support the Call for Action and the campaign itself.

You will understand that the whole campaign will cost a lot of money; for Germany alone we expect costs of 50-100.000 Euro. The organizations in the member states are asked to look for funding themselves and in every country money is desperately needed.

We have set up an organizational website, where every country is listed. In some states the contact data of a main organizer are missing, which simply means, that every organization is welcome to start organizing protest there.

If you have any further questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me, you'll find my contact data below.

Best regards, _NAME_ - AK Vorrat Germany -

Background:

The protest is based on an idea of the "AK Vorrat" ("German Working group on data retention"; http://www.ak-vorrat.de/), a german human rights group, which is supported in Germany by over 49 national organizations like human and civil rights groups, associations of journalists, lawyers and doctors, the associations of confessional and emergency help lines.[1][2]

[1] The AK Vorrat has filed the largest "class-action" constitutional case of all times in Germany (as a symbol) against the adoption of the european directive on data retention (DR 2006/24/EC): http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/content/view/202/79/ (de/en)

[2] Joint statement on the draft bill on telecommunications data retention: http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/content/view/80/100/ (de/en)

[3] Link to Draft European Call for Action: http://wiki.ak-vorrat.de/Freedom_Not_Fear_2008/Call_for_action