"Australia's Leader Called For A Crackdown On Environmentalists Before Fires Broke Out," 17 Jan 2020

Just weeks before unprecedented wildfires broke out across Australia, killing an estimated 1 billion animals, the prime minister declared that the country faced a terrible threat: environmental protesters.

“A new breed of radical activism is on the march,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a November speech. He added that there was a “place for peaceful protests,” but he wasn’t going to stand for environmentalists obstructing and delaying mining projects or calling for boycotts of banks that finance the country’s coal industry...

State lawmakers had already passed a new law targeting environmental protesters, which allows officers to search activists without a warrant and criminalizes the use of locking devices that make it hard for police to remove protesters during a sit-in...

Almost 100 prosecutions were documented worldwide against environmentalists or activists defending community land rights from corporate interests last year by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. Ana Zbona, a project manager at the center, told BuzzFeed News that such prosecutions were most common in countries like Peru, Russia, and the Philippines, but said it was rapidly becoming more common in the US...

In the US, the Trump administration recently asked Congress for broader powers to stop protests against oil pipelines, such as the months-long demonstration in 2016 and 2017 to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline near the territory of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Last June, the administration called on Congress to add “impeding, disrupting or inhibiting operation” of pipelines — or those under construction — to an existing federal law that punishes “damaging or destroying” one with 20 years in prison.