At a recent human rights colloquium held in Sao Paulo, activists and human rights defenders from around the world confirmed the growing importance of the street and the square in the struggle to realise basic rights. Recent examples included the victories won by Movimento Estudantil in Chile and the occupiers of Taksim Square in Turkey. Like the occupiers of Tahrir Square and Zucotti Park before them, people in these movements claimed public city spaces to make democratic demands that have resonated on a global scale. Indeed, as Alexandra Délano and Melissa Ortiz Massó illustrated in their recent piece on Mexico, citizen-led protests can have a profound effect on political accountability and democracy.
However, the colloquium also substantiated the intensifying threat against the people occupying these spaces. Activists from Bahrain to Brazil have suffered increasingly violent state repression. And yet, the street is a site for public assembly where radical democratic achievements are being won, despite the serious risk of injury facing its occupiers.
Global media coverage of rights struggles and the street overlooks other important relationships people have with the street. Unfortunately, global media coverage of rights struggles and the street overlooks other important relationships people have with the street. The overwhelming focus has been on occupations of public spaces that are characterised by demonstration or protest, where vulnerability means injurability. Those who take to the streets in these instances are exposed to increasingly violent police and private security forces, and are vulnerable to the threat these forces often pose to their bodily integrity. The colloquium considered, for instance, the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa College students after an encounter with police at a demonstration in Mexico.
