Happy General Strike in Portugal to all who celebrate (everyone should be celebrating this 🤝 remind the govt that shitty labour == strike szn)
Free_yaah
@freyaa.bsky.social
4K followers 725 following 930 posts
I used to work in tech (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ but now I design with labour groups, run workshops with activists, occasionally make games and comics. 🚨 support fundraisers 🚨 The govt won't save us, but mutual aid will
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Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
In a normal world, this should be an immense scandal in Europe.
Le Monde has a long article describing the hellish life of Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the ICC in The Hague, due to U.S. sanctions punishing him for authorizing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes in Gaza.
Guillou's daily existence has been transformed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can't know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction.
He describes it as being "economically banned across most of the planet," including in his own country, France, and where he works, the Netherlands.
That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:
- punishing a European citizen
- for doing his job in Europe
- applying laws Europe officially supports
- at an institution based in Europe
- that Europe helped create and fund
and Europe is not only doing essentially nothing to protect him, they're actively enforcing America's sanctions against their own citizen - European banks closing his accounts, European companies refusing him service, European institutions standing by while Washington destroys a European judge's life on European soil.
Again, in a normal world, European leaders and citizens should be absolutely outraged about this. But we've so normalized the hollowing out of European sovereignty that the sight of a European citizen being economically executed on European soil for upholding European law is treated, at best, as an unfortunate technical complication in transatlantic
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