Twelve Greenpeace activists were today charged with breaching security at Africa's only nuclear power plant while 200 people staged a peaceful protest at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg.
Greenpeace spokesman Mr Mike Townsley said he and 11 others are to face charges of trespassing, breaching a maritime exclusion zone and breaching security at a national key point. They were ordered to appear at a magistrate's court next Friday after they staged a protest at the plant near Cape Town on Saturday.
The Greenpeace activists from, Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, Lebanon, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain climbed to the roof of a building at the plant and unfurled protest banners in a bid to draw attention to the dangers of nuclear and fossil fuels ahead of the UN Earth Summit that opened this morning.
As the Summit got under way, Zimbabwean and Ethiopian groups held the first in a series of planned protests. Amid a strong riot police presence, 200 singing and dancing members of Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change marched through Johannesburg's Sandton suburb where the Summit is taking place, calling for new elections and the removal of President Robert Mugabe.
About 8,000 security officers have been deployed to patrol the conference centre, aiming to head off the kind of street violence that happened during anti-globalisation protests at recent world summits in Seattle and Genoa.
Organisers expect the biggest protest to take place on Saturday, when about 400 groups plan to march from the Alexandra township to Sandton to protest against world poverty, environmental decay and globalisation.
AFP