We, the activists from the grassroots animal liberation group „Tierbefreiung Hamburg“  from Hamburg, Germany, would like to express our deepest solidarity with the “UK 3/SOCPA 7”-defendants. For us, it has always been important to support fellow activists that suffer from state repression in form of raising money, making demos at embassies and consulates, writing letters to prisoners or raising awareness for cases of repression.

We strongly reject the fact that activists, who spoke up against the violence on countless animals in the labs of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), who organized protests to stop the unjustifiable suffering of sentient beings, have to justify themselves in court and face several years of imprisonment. It is important that we as the animal rights/animal liberation movement and other progressive movements show our solidarity with the activists, who could have been us. Repression affects not only the involved activists and their surroundings in a strong personal and emotional way, it also affects our movement on a broader level. For those reasons, we have to support criminalized activists and to raise awareness about these cases.

What has been happening in the UK and other countries in the last years is more than obvious: animal rights activists have challenged the economic power structure by successfully attacking animal exploitation industries, and the state has reacted by protecting economic interests with repressive measures. With long prison sentences, surveillance, undercover officers, special laws such as the “animal enterprise terrorism act” in the US or the accusation of building criminal organizations the animal rights movement is one of the most criminalized social justice movements nowadays. But we see this development not as a ‘malfunctioning’ democracy but rather as a systemic way how capitalist societies are organized and deal with those, who question their core values. Such as the institutionalized violence against animals and the profit that is made from it, is protected by law, we cannot expect a free and just world for human and non-human beings within the current legal system and the society that frames it. Therefore a radical societal transformation, not only of the human-animal relations, is necessary.

We wish you, our comrades, a lot of power for the next month and years. With the mass-violence against animals that is so much normalized in society as well as sanctioned by law, with the fact, that those who take a stand against it are criminalized, these times may seem desperate and hard to bear. But with this statement, we´d like to show you and all the other people who take part in the animal liberation movement, that you are not alone. Together as an active and vital movement, with a strong culture of solidarity, and by building bridges to other progressive struggles, we can face our enemies and obstacles and will carry on to fight for a society without exploitation or domination.

We will continue fighting, as long as animals will be encaged and people will be imprisoned.