It really is the bridge too far for a freelance
IN JULY 2006 Mindy Ran, a radio freelance in the Netherlands, was covering a Fathers for Justice protest on the Waalbrug, the main bridge into Nijmegen, made famous in the second world war film A Bridge Too Far. The fathers had climbed up the structure, which was closed for hours.
Mindy Ran, who is an active NUJ member, was approached by a police officer, told she was a threat to the security of the bridge and threatened with arrest. She moved to a lookout point at the end of the bridge. The officer followed her and, she alleges, pushed her down a slope.
“I came down heavily on my left leg,” she says. “The bone in my upper leg went into the knee and crunched the cartilage and damaged the ligaments.”
The injury is painful and long lasting. Mindy Ran needed surgery and is still walking with crutches. But she has had no compensation and has now lost her challenge to the Dutch police.
Her work has been badly affected. “I was a really good street journalist,” she says. “But I can’t do that any more — I was great at demos and the G8 — but I can’t stand up that long.”
Supported by the NUJ and the Dutch union, the NVJ — she is a joint member of the two unions — Mindy Ran took her complaint through the police’s own procedures.
The case was thrown out so she took it on to the Dutch Ombudsman, who ruled in May against all aspects but one — that police should put journalists covering public events in contact with a press liaison officer if there is a dispute over their credentials.
Mindy Ran says this did not go nearly far enough: the Ombudsman did not say that journalists should not be removed or manhandled, nor that police were wrong to treat her as a protester — “even with a press badge on my chest, with cans, microphone and recorder.”
The judgement ignored her injury — and the way police abused anti-terror legislation to act against her. “Under Dutch anti-terror law, once the guy declared me a security threat to the bridge he could do whatever he wanted.
“I went through this process because I wanted to start the debate over increasing use of anti-terror legislation against journalists and photographers,” she says, “but they completely ignored that aspect, and the Dutch media have failed to pick up on the debate.”
It’s important for other journalists, she says. “I’m just your general hack. If it was going to happen to me it could happen to anybody.”
Mindy Ran will not be able to take her complaint any further because it is not possible to bring a civil action against the police in the Netherlands.
“I’m at the end of the road,” she says. “I want to focus on getting mobile again. I want to dance this New Year.”
Mindy Ran has represented members in Continental Europe on the NUJ national executive for seven years. She is the chair of the union’s Equality Council and of the equivalent Gender Council of the IFJ.