Climate protesters win groundbreaking class action against Victoria police over use of pepper spray | Australia news
Climate protesters win class-action lawsuit against Victoria police for using capsicum spray during an anti-mining demonstration in Melbourne.
The first class-action lawsuit against Victoria police over alleged overuse of oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray was heard in the state supreme court earlier this year and a decision was handed down on Friday.
The hearing before Judge Claire Harris was presided over by protester Jordan Brown, who was shot twice with OC spray while protesting outside the international mining and resources conference (IMARC) in October 2019.
Harris found on Friday that Brown was the subject of unlawful assault by police and awarded him $54,000 in damages.
“The batteries caused both plaintiff’s physical injury and materially contributed to plaintiff’s psychological injury,” Harris said.
Brown said during the hearing: “This is the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced.
“I stayed away from my body for a long time.”
While the police acknowledged the use of OC spray, they argued that its use was legal.
Brown’s lawyers argued the spraying breached Victoria Police’s internal policies and procedures, the Victorian Crime Act and the state’s human rights charter and amounted to “an unreasonable, unlawful and disproportionate use of force amounting to battery and assault”.
They said the hearing could set a precedent for how police use OC spray, but Harris rebutted Friday, saying her decision was only about the way it was used by police in this case.
Her decision has not yet been published, but Harris said it was not open to the court to make statements about alleged violations of the human rights convention.
The court heard police and protesters clashed outside the conference on October 30, with officers using OC spray as they tried to arrest two activists who had climbed the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre.
Fiona Forsyth KC, representing Brown, argued that the use of OC spray was “completely unjustified” and that the lead plaintiff had suffered physical and psychological injuries.
Forsyth told the court that Brown was unarmed when he was sprayed twice by two police officers on Oct. 30, 2019. The court heard Brown tried to run away when he was sprayed by the second officer.
“He wasn’t approaching anyone in an aggressive manner, he wasn’t posing a threat to anyone, he wasn’t interfering with any arrests,” he said.
“He was just standing. A harmful and excruciatingly painful substance was sprayed directly on his head and face.”
But a lawyer representing the state said the protester was part of a group that “swarmed” into an area and thwarted attempts to arrest him.
In evidence, police officer Sergeant Nicholas Bolzonello told the court that he and his colleagues used OC spray because they were “at a stalemate” with protesters and were unable to move through the crowd to arrest a protester who had climbed a pole.
Bolzonello told the court that “tension was high” and that he and his colleagues had just emerged from a “hostile environment”.
He called it “an effective crowd dispersal tool that allows us to move through the crowd,” according to the court filing, but lead plaintiff attorney Stella Gold argued to the officer that there was nothing in the police OC manual that described such use.
Bolzonello later explained that his understanding came from training and how he referred to this “internally”.
More details to come…
