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Police officers stand guard as Pro-Palestine demonstrators take part in a protest on the second anniversary of October 7th to condemn the ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza since then and to demand the stop of the war on October 07, 2025 in Muenster, Germany. [Hesham Elsherif – Anadolu Agency].
UN human rights experts on Thursday called on Germany to end what they described as the “criminalising, punishing, and suppressing” of legitimate Palestinian solidarity activism, warning that the country’s actions undermine fundamental democratic freedoms, Anadolu reports.
“We are alarmed by the persistent pattern of police violence and apparent suppression of Palestine solidarity activism by Germany,” the experts said in a statement.
They urged Berlin to uphold its human rights obligations and “to respect and facilitate the right to peaceful assembly for everyone without discrimination.” The experts stressed that “non-violent protests are protected and must not be punished,” and that dissenting political views “must not be subject to undue restrictions based on content.”
According to the experts, Germany has intensified restrictions on pro-Palestinian protests since October 2023 – when Israel’s relentless offensive on Gaza began – even though most demonstrations have been peaceful. Protesters have voiced demands such as halting arms exports to Israel, ensuring humanitarian access to Gaza, and recognizing the state of Palestine.
They said demonstrators in Berlin had been met with police violence, arrests, and bans, including cases where people were detained simply for chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The experts said German courts have issued contradictory rulings on whether the slogan constitutes protected speech or condones violence.
“Germany must support, not suppress, actions aiming to stop atrocity crimes and genocide,” the experts said. “No circumstances can justify unnecessary and excessive police violence or unjust criminalisation for exercising fundamental freedoms.”
Critics say Germany’s foreign policy stance has been mirrored by a domestic campaign to silence pro-Palestinian voices. Over the past two years, authorities have banned hundreds of rallies, canceled cultural events and academic panels, and denied visas to prominent international speakers critical of Israel.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a staunch ally of Israel, has repeatedly emphasized Germany’s historical responsibility for Israel’s security, rooted in its Nazi past and the Holocaust.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
The welfare system has taken another hit today via a ‘benefits crackdown’ in Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement. Since the ‘welfare reform’ of 2007, disabled people have been on the receiving end of these dehumanising and punishing policies that make people out as ‘undeserving’, prioritise work over people, and make life unlivable.
But we now have evidence the Department for Work and Pensions (DPW) knows its policies kill people. It has been repeatedly warned of this fact and has even confirmed it in its own research.
It took years of campaigning by disabled people to uncover this evidence, which largely comes in the form of DWP reviews into deaths of claimants.
Now it has been brought together as part of the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing Justice London. Since 2021, journalist John Pring and I have been creating a timeline – co-produced with disabled people – showing the links between welfare policy and disabled people’s deaths.
It also shows that not only is there often a delay between the introduction of a policy and the brutal impact it has on people’s lives, but that delay tactics are central to DWP’s weaponisation of time as a strategy to avoid accountability.
To make matters worse, most families of those who have died do not even know if a review has been carried out into their loved one’s death because the DWP has always argued this is private information – an argument found by an Information Rights Tribunal to be an error in law – and can’t be shared, not even with families.
The first family to see an IPR was Philippa Day’s. Philippa, known as Pip, took her own life in 2019 after her disability benefits were stopped.
In January 2021, the coroner at the inquest into Philippa’s death found 28 separate “problems” with the administration of the Personal Independent Payment (PIP) system contributed to her death – concluding these were not individual errors by DWP and its private sector contractor Capita but systemic flaws.
Pip’s sister Imogen told us, in an interview for the Deaths by Welfare podcast, that seeing the IPR “silenced my night-time questions, right before I was going to sleep… It made it incredibly clear that we as a family had done everything that we could have done, and that it was a governmental system that had let her down”.
“I really feel for families that still don’t have answers,” she said.
And Pip is not alone. It would later come to light, after a sustained (and continuing) Freedom of Information battle, that between 2014 and 2022, the DWP carried out approximately 220 of these reviews – formerly called peer reviews, now internal process reviews (IPRs).
After finally obtaining redacted versions of some of these, we found evidence of persistent and systemic issues across welfare policy, and evidence that welfare policy is life-threatening. The reviews also contained hundreds of recommendations, which the DWP has admitted having no system for tracking.
What makes DWP reviews into what it calls the ‘death of a customer’ important is that they are (supposedly) tools through which the DWP investigates the harms of its own policies. And yet, they are designed and carried out in a way that systemically hides any state accountability. And delays in releasing the reviews is another way the department can avoid being held accountable.
What we have discovered has been learnt slowly, largely through a mixture of FOIs, parliamentary questions, queries to the DWP press office and documents released through court cases or inquests. Many of the FOIs have been submitted by Disability News Service over the last nine years.
An investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO) on the information the DWP holds on benefit claimants who ended their lives by suicide, found the DWP does not identify patterns between people’s deaths, meaning that “systemic issues which might be brought to light through these reviews could be missed”.
The NAO also found access to the reports is restricted to the team handling them and the recommendations are not tracked or monitored, meaning the DWP “does not know whether the suggested improvements are implemented”.
These recommendations include repeated warnings that policies to assess people for out-of-work disability benefits were putting the lives of “vulnerable” claimants (likely to be mostly people with mental health conditions or learning difficulties) at risk.
Yes, the DWP’s own investigations were identifying policies as potentially life-threatening. The IPRs also showed a recurring pattern of staff failure to follow DWP’s suicide guidance, which was introduced in 2009.
Tactics used to delay the release of information include claims by the DWP that the time required to collect data, due to lack of centralised record-keeping, was too costly and not in the public interest.
This was used under Thérèse Coffey to block requests about how many inquests relating to benefits claimants who died by suicide her department had submitted evidence to, as well as requests to find out how many inquests had ruled DWP policies were partly responsible for the deceased person’s state of mind. In both of these cases, the information wasn’t shared due to “disproportionate cost”.
These reviews should be publicly available by default, and the DWP should be held publicly accountable to making the changes required.
Yet it may be that the IPR process is by design unable to apprehend government accountability in people’s deaths. IPR findings and recommendations come from within the system that kills people, and therefore may never be enough for full accountability or justice. While some ascribe people’s deaths to flaws in a system that needs reform, others see them as endemic to a system that needs dismantling and creating anew, with disabled people, and the analysis developed through lived experience, at the core.
