Global Peace and Justice Auckland (GPJA) describes itself as "a network of people who provide a platform for individuals and groups to discuss and organise co-operatively on peace and justice issues." They are well known for organising the Auckland component of the global February 15, 2003 anti-war protest that attracted 10, 000 people to protest the impending United States attack on Iraq.
GPJA also became notable when on March 19, 2005 a GPJA organised march of around 300 people who marched up Auckland's Queen Street and into the ANZ Bank on the corner of Victoria and Queen Streets. As a result of the bank occupation a stand off between GPJA organisers and police began. After about an hour of occupying the bank and the road outside five people were arrested for allegedly blocking the road. Police tried to arrest GPJA organiser Simon Oosterman and protestors attempted to stop them resulting in violence between protestors and police.
Famous quotes containing the words global, peace and/or justice:
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“In time of war you know much more what children feel than in time of peace, not that children feel more but you have to know more about what they feel. In time of peace what children feel concerns the lives of children as children but in time of war there is a mingling there is not children’s lives and grown up lives there is just lives and so quite naturally you have to know what children feel.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)