Our friends are being charged with hooliganism for standing up to Gazprom. It’s an incredibly serious charge and carries a maximum sentence of 7 years in a Russian jail. Please tweet these people with millions of followers to help #FreeTheArctic30.
UPDATE: The Twitter millionaire tally is growing rapidly: showing their support for the Arctic 30 are Stephen Fry, Russell Brand, Alejandro Sanz, Eugenio Derbéz, Marcelo Tinelli, Murat Dalkiliç, Jared Leto, Frankie Boyle, Café Tacuba, Neil Gaiman, Simon Pegg, Davina McCall, Anne-Curtis Smith, Jugs Jugueta, and Deepak Chopra.
It’s an outrage. These 30 men and women were acting peacefully and with all of our futures at heart. Now it’s our turn to step up to help them. It’s time to create a global outcry - the kind of coverage that will shame Arctic oil drillers Gazprom into getting the charges dropped. We know they’re behind the over-reaction of the Russian authorities.
We don’t have the billions of $$$ that Gazprom make every year in profit - about $30,000 since you started reading this blog. But more valuable than all their billions is real people power.
RIght now, we need people. We need you. The only thing that will protect the Arctic, our global climate and our friends in jail, is a mass movement. For the past two weeks we’ve all been screaming our lungs out on social media and in the streets, telling the world to #FreeTheArctic30.
Now it’s time to up our game and ask where others stand too. We need their support.
Let’s get 30 people with more than a million followers on Twitter to speak out to #FreeTheArctic30. One for every activist unjustly detained.
If we succeed, we’ll be getting a global reach 30 times larger than the New York Times newspaper, or Moskovskij Komsomolets - Russia’s largest circulation daily.
We’ve pulled together a list at the top of this blog of people we think should be supportive. They’ve supported similar campaigns in the past, they’re all good people and we’re asking them politely for their help.
Please use the links at the top of this post to generate your tweets, or write your own. Ask your favourite Twitter ‘millionaire’ to tweet something like:
Please tweet your support to #FreeTheArctic30 in Russian jail. Activism is not piracy. http://greenpeace.org/freeouractivists
We are internationalists. We have no argument with the Russian people. The struggle we’re involved in transcends all the political borders today’s politicians haggle over. We’re in this to protect the Arctic - and our global climate - for everyone, everywhere, for generations to come.
That’s what the Arctic 30 were peacefully protesting for. While they sit in a Russian jail facing an uncertain future, it's down to all of us to stand up for them.
