Conference speeches: Statewatching Europe: Civil Liberties, the State and the EU. European conference marking Statewatch’s 20th anniversary, London, 25 June 2011

The opening plenary session saw speeches from Gareth Peirce (solicitor and author of Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice) discussing the war on terror and Tony Bunyan (Director of Statewatch) on the state of Europe.

The conference also featured six workshops:

+ Immigration, asylum and border controls
+ Mass surveillance and technologies of control
+ The Stockholm Programme and the post-Lisbon EU
+ Criminalising communities and the policing of protest
+ Racism, Islamophobia and the far right
+ Defending civil liberties: strategies of resistance

The conference closed with a second plenary session, entitled 'Charting the terrain: the decade ahead'. The discussion was led by a panel comprised of Shami Chakrabati (Director, Liberty); Courtenay Griffith QC (Garden Court Chambers); Aidan White (Secretary-General, International Federation of Journalists, 1987-2011) and Tony Bunyan (Director, Statewatch).

Statewatch: European Monitoring & Documentation Centre on Justice and Home Affairs in the EU (SEMDOC) http://www.statewatch.org/semdoc/

Statewatch: Search the Statewatch database http://database.statewatch.org/search.asp

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