“I’m Assala, and I’m a queer activist from Tunisia. You need to stay out of prison, not inside, to keep doing what you’re doing. So, in some way, there’s an effect and an impact on what you do. You try to find different ways to express yourself and reach the government and the people in ways that are, let’s say, safer and smarter to protect yourself. But the mass arrests of people are creating new ways to build cases against individuals.“
“At Équipe Média, we document the daily life of the Sahrawis, human rights violations, and the testimonies and situations of political prisoners. But we do this clandestinely because Morocco criminalizes journalism in Western Sahara. Repression is constantly changing and innovating. Morocco uses different methods, some of them very new, such as psychological repression and the defamation of journalists and activists.“
“I’m Victoria from Futuro Vegetal. At the European level, there is brutal repression of the environmental movement, even the right to protest is in question. Activists who have already been arrested or detained are not allowed to go to demonstrations, they are placed under house arrest. This has happened in Germany, also in the UK. In France, one of the collectives was banned for a year. For the past nine months, some of us have been facing charges for belonging to a criminal organization, which makes you very afraid and forces you to consider things about your life that you don’t want to consider.“
“I’m Salah, a Palestinian activist. Today, Palestine is the small laboratory where everything is experimented on with Palestinians before these technologies are sold outside the dictatorship, to the police and other entities. We’ve been warning about the issue of Pegasus for a long time. The phone surveillance went beyond Palestinians and later caused scandals in France, Spain, and the Arab world. We’ve been detained for a long time at Damascus Gate because of facial recognition and cameras. Nowadays, everyone talks about it, but this continues to happen in Palestine.“