In response to a request from Memorial University, the RNC charged three participants of the occupation of the Arts and Administration Building with petty trespassing late Friday night. Charged protesters have received a court date, and could face up to a $200 dollar fine if found guilty.
Since June 7th, student protesters have occupied the building as part of MUN Students For Palestine divestment campaign. It has since been revealed that $7,144,370 of Memorial’s portfolio is invested in two companies with direct ties to Israel’s invasion of Gaza and a third involved in the establishment and maintenance of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian Territories.
Devoney Ellis, one of the student protesters who was charged, says she is “feeling very disappointed in my university,” but is not dissuaded from continuing to protest. Ellis’s message to MUN is that they “are not going to silence us in the face of a genocide, thats simply not going to happen.”
Additionally, Campus Enforcement Patrol officers were given orders from MUN to dismantle and remove all tents from the science building courtyard. This encampment dubbed Yazan’s Yard by student protesters has now been cleared.
In a statement posted to Instagram, MUN Students For Palestine says they are “outraged by Memorial University’s gross misuse of resources” and says that their “methods were chaotic, disorganised and showed a complete disregard for safety, especially the safety of racialized and international students.”
MUN Cites Ontario Superior Court ruling as Basis for Shutting Down Protest, Legal Expert Says Other Provinces Rulings are ‘not binding’ in NL
In a statement published in the Gazette, MUN defends their actions to shut down protest by writing that they align with the Ontario Superior Court decision that granted the University of Toronto an injunction to dismantle the pro-Palestinian student encampment on their campus.
MUN asserts that “the legal principles around property ownership and control of property are equally applicable,” however according to law professor Heidi Matthews, MUNs statement is misleading, and ignores whether or not Charter rights apply in this context.
In a comment provided to the Muse, Matthews writes that “different provinces each have different regulatory regimes governing the relationship between provincial governments and universities. A court in this province may well decide the question of Charter application to campus differently than the Ontario court did in the UofT case; indeed, the Court of Appeal of Alberta has recently decided that universities are not ‘Charter-free zones’.”
Matthews explains that the facts of the UofT case and what’s happening on MUN campus are very different:
“The harm identified by the judge in the UofT case emanated from the fact that encampment members had ‘appropriated control’ over Front Campus in a way that excluded others and prevented the university from using the space.”
In what Matthews calls “language taken from the UofT case,” MUN’s statement asserts that “students have been occupying the lobby of the building to the exclusion of others.”
However, according to Matthews “there does not appear to be any evidence that the Memorial students occupying the Arts and Administration building had ‘appropriated control’ over the building.”
As for the three protesters who were charged with petty trespassing, Matthews says they may choose to challenge their charges on the basis of freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly rights granted by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.