Pro-life college students will be charged with criminal trespass on their own university campus in formerly free Canada later this month, after they defied administrators' demands that they turn their materials away from onlookers, according to this Calgary Herald report.
Calgary anti-abortion activists charged
CALGARY — A group of anti-abortion student activists are heading to court this month after the University of Calgary charged them with trespassing.
Campus Pro-Life and university administrators have been locked in a dispute over a controversial anti-abortion display called the Genocide Awareness Project, which puts images of dead fetuses next to images of Holocaust or Rwanda genocide victims.
The student group went ahead on Nov. 26 with plans to erect the display against the university's requests to turn the graphic images inward to protect those who didn't wish to see them. More than two months later, some of the students behind the project have been charged with trespassing and received summonses to court on Feb 27.
"It's surprising, to say the least, as well as disappointing," said Campus Pro-Life president Leah Hallman. "I agree we were warned (about the possibility of legal action). But we had a lot of hope. now a lot of that hope has now been crushed."
The university has not yet responded to a request for comment. But in a written statement issued when the display was put up in November, the university administration said it had "asked the Calgary Police Service to issue the appropriate summonses to the individuals ignoring the notice of trespass or to take other appropriate steps to enforce the directive." (emphasis added) At the time, it went on to say the matter might be resolved "through the court system.”
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