UK Climate Campaigners Get 'Utterly Disproportionate' Sentences

July 18, 2024

"Rulings like today's set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest," a U.N. official said.

In a decision that one United Nations official called "beyond comprehension," a U.K. judge on Thursday sentenced five Just Stop Oil activists to a combined 21 years in prison over a Zoom call in which they discussed plans to disrupt London's orbital M25 highway.

The sentences are believed to be the longest on record for nonviolent protest in U.K. history, The Guardian reported.

"The sentences handed to the five Just Stop Oil campaigners are utterly disproportionate," environmentalist and author George Monbiot wrote on social media. "Four and five years in prison for peaceful protest? This is what you might expect in Russia or Egypt, not in a supposed democracy."

"Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?"

The five activists—Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin—were found guilty last week of conspiring to cause a public nuisance due to a four-day direct action protest on the M25 that Just Stop Oil ultimately held in November 2022. All of the defendants participated in a Zoom call in which they planned to recruit volunteers for the protest, which was intended to pressure the U.K. government to end oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, a policy that the incoming Labour government has now adopted. The Zoom call had been infiltrated by a Sun journalist, who shared its contents with the Metropolitan Police.

On Thursday, Judge Christopher Hehir sentenced Hallam to five years in prison and Shaw, Lancaster, De Abreu, and Gethin to four each.

The sentences sparked outrage from humans rights advocates and environmental campaigners.

Michel Forst, U.N. special rapporteur on environmental defenders who also observed part of the trial, said the sentencing "marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders, and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom."

Forst added: "Rulings like today's set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest that may, at one point or another, not align with the interests of the government of the day."

Former Green Party leader and Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas called the sentences "obscene."

"Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?" she asked on social media.

Current Deputy Leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said: "'Conspiracy to commit a public nuisance' is a deeply authoritarian description that should send shivers down the spine of all of us who want to live in a free society. Even worse when the real crime is consecutive governments who have played down the climate emergency."

Campaigners and experts also criticized the trial itself, in which Hehir did not allow the defendants to present evidence about the climate crisis to explain their actions.

"Defendants should be allowed to explain why they have decided to use nonconventional but yet peaceful forms of action, like civil disobedience, when they engage in environmental protest," Forst toldThe Guardian after attending part of the trial.

Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London—who Hehir did not allow the defendants to call as a witness—called the trial and verdict a "farce."

"They mark a low point in British justice, and they were an assault on free speech," McGuire in a statement said Thursday. "The judge's characterization of climate breakdown as a matter of opinion and belief is completely nonsensical and demonstrates extraordinary ignorance. Similarly to suggest that the climate emergency is irrelevant in relation to whether the defendants had a reasonable case for action is crass stupidity."

The verdict and sentencing also come amid an increasing crackdown on climate protest, both globally and in the U.K. The previous longest known civil disobedience sentences in the country were also for Just Stop Oil activists.

"The U.K. is a nightmare for climate activists from this point of view, in the sense that the sentences imposed in other countries are neither that harsh, nor that widespread," Forst said July 12.

Greenpeace U.K.'s program director Amy Cameron said on Thursday: "These sentences are not a one-off anomaly but the culmination of years of repressive legislation, overblown government rhetoric, and a concerted assault on the right of juries to deliberate according to their conscience. It's part of the mess the Labour government has inherited from its predecessor, and they must fix it by giving back to people the right to protest that's been slowly being taken away from them."

Forst also called on the new government to reverse course.

"Given the gravity of the situation, I urge the new United Kingdom government, with absolute urgency and without undo delay, to take all necessary steps to ensure that Mr. Shaw's sentence is reduced in line with the United Kingdom's obligations under the Aarhus Convention," Forst wrote on Thursday.

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[Top photo: An activist puts up a banner reading "Just Stop Oil" atop an electronic traffic sign along M25 on November 10, 2022 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images)]