Police surround protesters outside the Bella centre Photograph: Christian Charisius/Reuters

When I signed up for this, 6 months ago, the last thing I expected to experience during my short stay in Copenhagen was covering my face from tear gas while being snarled at by dogs and shouted at by police. I came to Copenhagen to engage with the process, to enter the UN and make my views heard. To tell the decision makers the story of my generation and why they can’t make those decisions about us, without us. Since yesterday that is exactly what they have been doing.

To make space for the world ‘leaders’ civil society has almost entirely been kicked out of the conference, right at the crunch time when they need to be present. Government leaders, ministers and negotiators have now bunkered down and continue to make decisions behind closed doors.

So how, as a concerned citizen, am I meant to make my voice heard if I’m not allowed in? This was the issue facing over a thousand people today, as they marched towards the Bella Centre to make their voice heard in the only way they could: Forcing there way into the grounds of the conference centre to hold their own people’s rally.

It is every citizen’s right, in a democracy, to freedom of speech and to protest. Without protests, the civil rights movement would not have worked. Without protests, slavery would still be legal. So why, now, do protests have such a bad name? They are labeled as ‘riots’ and the media focuses on any violence that occurs. Of course, there are always people out to cause trouble for the sake of it, but they are a tiny minority. What occurred today in Copenhagen was a thousand excluded people, peacefully attempting to highlight the failures of a process that lets us all down, and to include themselves in decisions that will affect them and their children. A process that allows Nick Griffin, an outspoken racist, to enter the conference, but excludes the presence of over 1000 young people wanting to involve themselves in their own future.

Exclusion from a process that affects you leads to frustration, anger, fear and drastic measures to counter those feelings. If the UN process worked, if it was truly transparent and if we were allowed in when it actually mattered, we wouldn’t need to be outside, we wouldn’t need to be barked at, and we wouldn’t need to be tear gassed. A protest is a failure of the process that excludes and prejudges people, not the people who are protesting.