Today, Jaggi Singh of No One is Illegal Montreal is in a Toronto Courtroom over charges related to last year’s mobilization against the gathering of the G20. He is pleading guilty to a charge of ‘counseling to commit mischief over $5,000’. This is how his support for resistance to an international gathering of thieves and murderers has been characterized by the State’s prosecutors.
Jaggi’s decision to plead guilty in this matter is a tactical one that we understand and respect. He offers no cringing apologies and implicates no one. He takes what he considers to be the best course to dispose of the charges he has been facing, including three counts of criminal conspiracy, and resume, unimpeded, his vital role in the struggle against everything that was on the agenda at last year’s G20 gathering.
Jaggi faces jail time because he spoke in Toronto shortly before the G20 leaders arrived and, at that time, he deplored the impending summit as a meeting of those ‘responsible for enormous suffering and oppression’.
Specifically, he denounced the billion dollar security operation and security fence that was erected to protect the ‘executive board of global capitalism’ and said he would ‘support those who want to take down this fence’. For saying this, Jaggi Singh may well go to prison.
OCAP was proud to be part of the mobilization against the vile G20 gathering that was inflicted on our City last year. That these exploiters and criminals could make their plans for robbery and violence across the world and not have their fence torn down and be chased out is, to us, only a reflection of the fact that our movement of resistance to them is not yet as strong as it must become. We’re proud of the mobilization that took place but it needs to grow to a level where there is nowhere on this planet for the G20 to meet because the system it speaks for has been abolished.
Jaggi Singh spoke the truth last summer and his words were in the interests of the great bulk of the people on this planet. We stand with him in the face of attack by the so called ‘justice system’ and we stand with him in the fight against capitalist austerity.
For more information and background see: www.clac-montreal.net/jaggi
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)
www.ocap.ca
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