Held for an hour and a half at the UN

It is illegal to protest within the buildings of the UN. Indeed in New York, apart from the children's rights march through the city - for which we took a Summerhill Supporting Children's Rights Banner, the only place you could protest was in a car park hidden around the corner from the UN. If you walked that way you could see the surreal sight of people with placards marching up and down the car park. A pathetic image of freedom of speech and protest.

As we walked across the road to the UN building, stuffing our A4 sheets saying 'Shame America' into our plastic bags with our notes and itinerary, we had little idea that we would be seen as criminals. As I past the guard on the roadside I had the A4 sheet taped to my T-shirt. He stopped me with a threateningly serious face. It is part of my T-shirt I defended with English arrogance. He stopped me, I took it off and placed it in the bag. There was no laughter. There was no smile. I was the idiot from England.

We put our bags onto the X-ray machine, walked through the metal detector. I got slightly ahead of the young people, and waited for them just inside the building.

Two tall guards walked-up to me and told me to accompany them. They lead me to my students, who were rather stressed. I asked what was happening and was told that we were being held under suspicion that we intended to protest inside the building. We explained that we had just come from a protest outside the UN Chapel and that we had simply put the sheets in our bags instead of littering the street. For an hour they kept us in a corner, waiting, giving us glances of contempt. What compounded their distrust of us was when my fourth student, James, who had gone from the protest to another meeting came walking up to the security tent wearing a protest sheet on his T-shirt. We laughed at the ridiculous situation that was about to confront us. What would they believe when they found out James was one of my students, as he protested his innocent way into and through the security system.

They told us that they wanted us to hand in our security passes. We wanted to see John Denham MP, the UK delegate, give his speech to the UN assembly. We refused to give in our passes. We waited another half hour.

Eventually a group of UN officials from the NGO office came to see us. We started explaining to them what had happened. One of them winked and said that she had seen us and heard my short speech attacking the US delegate. She asked us if we had intended to protest inside the UN. She had liked my speech. She explained that she had to be seen to tell us off and warn us. She told us, infront of the security, that we would be banned from UN buildings for life, as would the organisations that we represented - important UK NGO's! We agreed not to protest in the building and to the anger of the guards the UN officials let us into the building... and we got to hear John Denham, and to eat in the UN restaurant, to use the NGO photocopiers, telephones and faxes, and to lobby and to send messages to the press in the UK!