Swedish student Elin Ersson made headlines around the world yesterday when she refused to sit down on a flight that was being used to deport an asylum seeker to Afghanistan.
The 21-year-old bought a ticket from Gothenburg, where she attends university, to Turkey, after she and other activists learned of the planned deportation of a young Afghan man. The young man didn’t end up being on the flight, but another Afghan man in his 50s was, so as she boarded the flight, Ersson began live streaming her protest over Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/hamzahtoraby786/videos/1889312124464701/
Many of her fellow passengers were sympathetic, and some weren’t, as Ersson responded to detractors with “I don’t want a man’s life to be taken away just because you don’t want to miss your flight”, adding “I am not going to sit down until the person is off the plane.”
A steward repeatedly told her to stop filming, but Ersson responded that she was “doing what I can to save a person’s life. All I want to do is stop the deportation and then I will comply with the rules here. This is all perfectly legal and I have not committed a crime.”
After a standoff in which airport officials declined to use force to remove Ersson, the asylum seeker was removed from the plane to applause from passengers.
Despite her claim, Ersson actually could face fines and up to six months in jail for disobeying a pilot’s orders.
https://www.facebook.com/hamzahtoraby786/posts/1890759610986619
This protest got me wondering what the legal issues around doing something similar in Australia would be, given our less than stellar policies around everything to do with refugees.
As it turns out, in 2015, a protestor successfully prevented the possible deportation of a Tamil asylum seeker on a Qantas flight by refusing to take her seat, and she along with two other passengers who joined her protest and the asylum seeker himself were removed from the plane.
The protestor, Melbourne student and activist Jasmine Pilbrow, was eventually found guilty of interfering with a crew member of an aircraft, although no conviction was recorded, and Pilbrow paid Qantas almost $3500 in compensation.
Under the Civil Aviation Act 1988, interference with crew or aircraft can carry with it a sentence of imprisonment for up to 2 years.
Protests that have involved preventing planes from taking off have increased in frequency over the past few years; the first instance of a Home Office charter flight being prevented from taking off in the UK took place in March of last year, when protestors locked themselves to both the wheel and wing of the plane. The flight was scheduled to deport 57 people to Nigeria and Ghana and had to be cancelled, and all air traffic diverted to other airports.
Civil disobedience has a long history, from Henry David Thoreau to Martin Luther King Jr, the latter of whom said in his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963:
“One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Activists like Pilbrow and Ersson remind us of the importance of resisting unjust laws and practices where we can. In the words of historian and activist Howard Zinn: “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”