Protesters for Kaia Sealey join Labour Day march

Ac­tivists be­hind the 19 Protests move­ment brought their cam­paign to Fyz­abad on Labour Day, us­ing the his­toric ob­ser­vance to re­new calls for trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty in the wake of the fa­tal po­lice-in­volved shoot­ing of Joshua Sama­roo and the crit­i­cal in­juries suf­fered by his girl­friend, Ka­ia Sealey.

Ad­dress­ing sup­port­ers, move­ment leader Alyssa Phillip said the demon­stra­tion marked the group’s “nine­teenth and fi­nal protest cam­paign” and urged cit­i­zens to con­tin­ue de­mand­ing an­swers from pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions.

“This gath­er­ing marks the nine­teenth and fi­nal protest cam­paign in a move­ment that be­gan with one sim­ple de­mand: that truth must mat­ter,” Phillip said.

Draw­ing com­par­isons with the labour move­ment’s strug­gle for work­ers’ rights, Phillip ar­gued that or­di­nary peo­ple have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to ques­tion au­thor­i­ty and seek ac­count­abil­i­ty.

“A healthy democ­ra­cy does not fear scruti­ny. A healthy democ­ra­cy wel­comes scruti­ny,” she said.

Phillip al­so called on trade unions, civ­il so­ci­ety or­gan­i­sa­tions and cit­i­zens to unite be­hind the prin­ci­ple that “no one should be above ac­count­abil­i­ty”, main­tain­ing that jus­tice and trans­paren­cy strength­en pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions rather than un­der­mine them.

The move­ment emerged fol­low­ing the po­lice op­er­a­tion in which Sama­roo was killed and Sealey was crit­i­cal­ly wound­ed. Sealey has since been charged with mul­ti­ple of­fences aris­ing from the in­ci­dent and has been grant­ed bail.