Faced with the decision of the National Court to file the case in which the Navy was being investigated for the attack on the organization's activists during the peaceful protests against oil exploration in the Canary Islands, Greenpeace announces that it will appeal this resolution to the Constitutional Court.
"We consider it a step backwards in the right to peaceful demonstration. You cannot treat peaceful demonstrators, with a trajectory of more than 40 years of non-violent actions, who had already announced that they were not going to cause damage to property or people, as if they were dangerous pirates. Therefore, protected by the right to demonstration, we will go wherever necessary", declared the organization's lawyer, José Manuel Marraco.
In this way, Greenpeace will appeal to the Constitutional Court and, if necessary, to the European Court of Human Rights. The organization highlights the disproportion of the Navy's action in which three people were injured, one of them seriously.
"We all saw those images and we were able to verify the disproportion and brutality of an attack on people who were peacefully and unarmed protesting against an environmental aggression and who were violently rammed by the Navy", declared María José Caballero, Director of Campaigns at Greenpeace.
The events date back to November 2014 when, during a peaceful protest against Repsol's oil exploration in the Canary Islands, they were "violently rammed by members of the Navy who were protecting the multinational company's ship Rowan Renaissance." During the protest, three activists were injured, one of them the young Italian woman Matilde Brunetti fell into the sea and suffered an open fracture of the tibia, from which she is still recovering.