Today, a sentencing appeal has been launched for the  – Just Stop Oil activists recently given four and five year prison terms for planning disruptive peaceful protest against government failure on climate action. The fightback against repressive laws and a complicit judicial system is growing fast as a result of a rapid increase in prison sentences being handed out to peaceful protesters.

In this article we tie recent developments together and illustrate some of the ways people are resisting this increasing oppression.

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Last week a pre-emptive police action severely disrupted plans for a five-day Reclaim The Power climate camp in Yorkshire at the controversial Drax power station. On Thursday morning, police seized equipment such as tents, toilets, and even tracks designed to aid wheelchair access, arresting 22 people for alleged “conspiracy to interfere with key national infrastructure”.

Five Just Stop Oil activists were also arrested last week, accused of “conspiracy to cause public nuisance” over alleged plans to protest at airports, as part of worldwide actions calling for governments to work together towards a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. All five were immediately remanded in prison, although at least two of them had no previous convictions.

The use of ‘conspiracy’ charges to disrupt peaceful protest has ramped up recently, most markedly in the case of the four or five year prison sentences handed down to the #WholeTruth5, the Just Stop Oil activists whose action recruitment meeting in 2022 had been infiltrated by a reporter from Murdoch’s Sun newspaper.

At time of writing, there are 26 peaceful climate activists either serving sentences or on remand in UK prisons and nearly two hundred have been imprisoned over recent years.
Speaking at a rally in Parliament Square last week, human rights lawyer Raj Chada commented that in a career of more than 15 years representing peaceful protesters, until recently none of his clients had received prison sentences, but that something has changed over the last three years.

“The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law.” – George Bernard Shaw

In 2021, nine Insulate Britain activists were sent to prison by a judge with strong family connections to the oil industry. As reported by Real Media, they were imprisoned for breaching a private injunction which at the behest of the then government was taken out by a privatised company which ‘owns’ our UK roads. The following year, Birmingham GP Dr Sarah Benn, was sent to prison after holding a banner near Kingsbury oil terminal in breach of a private injunction there. She was just one of dozens imprisoned around that time for breaching private injunctions, with more than 50 on one day.

Currently 11 UK airports have taken out injunctions against “Persons Unknown” whose purpose is or includes protest, and is connected with the Just Stop Oil campaign, Extinction Rebellion, or other climate campaigns. One person was arrested at Glasgow airport simply for holding up a banner, and accredited journalists were recently detained for more than an hour at Heathrow airport, while “non-accredited” videographers and photographers at actions often face arrest.

Although it’s quite effective in the short run for companies to simply purchase private laws in this way, it’s not a particularly cost-effective nor anonymous method for the rich and powerful to silence protest – much better to persuade Parliament to enact laws as if devised through a democratic process.

Drax (which also currently has a private injunction in place against protest) is just one of the many energy and fossil fuel interests which sponsored government meetings for lobbyists such as Policy Exchange, who in 2022 published their report portraying Extinction Rebellion as a terrorist organisation and calling for new laws to crush them.

That report was heavily promoted by coal baron Matt Ridley, who is an advisor to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a controversial climate-denial “educational charity” based in Tufton Street. When not promoting clampdowns on protest, Matt Ridley writes comment pieces in The Telegraph, owned by the Barclay family (the Barclay brothers also owned the Ritz hotel for more than two decades before selling it to a Qatari investor). His latest, published last week, is an all-out attack on renewable energy, full of misleading claims.

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“Justice is open to everyone in the same way as the Ritz hotel.” –  Judge Sturgess

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Although charity law makes it hard to uncover funding sources, it’s known that Policy Exchange has received substantial sums from Exxon Mobil among others. In 2022, an independent investigation by Open Democracy revealed how millions flow from fossil fuel interests into the bank accounts of outfits like these.

Former chair of Vote Leave Lord Moynihan, who holds substantial shares in several fossil-fuel companies, is also a major funder of right-wing think tanks including GWPF.

GWPF has just been forced to make substantial changes after a two year investigation by the Charity Commission over its distorted representation of current science, its links to Net Zero Watch, and its funding sources.

As ‘educational charities’, organisations such as the Tufton Street-based Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange are supposed to engage equally with political parties, but over the past few years their trustees and executives have given around 500 times more donations to Conservatives than Lib Dems, and none at all to Labour.

In 2022, on the basis of recommendations made by these lobbyists, Parliament passed the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act with its new definition of public nuisance, and in 2023 the Public Order Act created the offence of interfering with key national infrastructure (which as well as protecting fossil fuel operations, just happens to shield Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper distribution as well as arms companies supplying Israel, and makes all but the shortest blocking of roads an imprisonable offence).

As a result of this new legislation the UK has jumped to the top of European states for imprisoning peaceful protesters. Just this month, at time of writing there have been 30 actions at airports across Europe, involving nearly 200 people, with among roughly 80 arrests. The UK is the only country that has remanded activists, 10 so far. The USA and Canada also saw three airports hit by multiple protests and again, no-one there has been remanded. A widely-condemned draconian response to a peaceful march against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) in Uganda saw 50 students arrested on Friday, but none there were immediately remanded.

Before the snap election, the Conservative government was considering an ‘independent’ review by John Woodcock (Lord Walney) on political violence and disruption. Far from independent, Woodcock has close links with arms manufacturers and fossil fuel firms and his report inevitably suggested banning groups such as Palestine Action, XR and Just Stop Oil, as well as greatly increasing police surveillance powers. It’s worth noting that police seem to have invested quite a lot of their resource in spying on peaceful climate protest, but we saw no pre-emptive ‘conspiracy’ arrests prior to around 100 violent and aggressive protests organised by racists around the country last week?

Whether the new government will dump Walney’s repressive recommendations is yet to be seen.

At the end of July this year, 92 civil organisations wrote an open letter to the new home secretary Yvette Cooper urging her to reverse “the steady erosion of the right to protest”, but the message certainly doesn’t seem to have got through yet. In the past week nine Palestine Action supporters have been held for days under Terrorism charges with restricted access to lawyers, after an action to prevent Elbit Systems sending drones and command systems to Israel. Today, seven of them were charged with various charges (none under the Terrorism Act), after doing an alleged million pounds of damage. A couple of weeks ago, two Just Stop Oil supporters were sent to prison for 2 years for climbing on a gantry as part of the 2022 M25 protests.

Comparing the recent spate of sentences of between 2 months and 3 years for serious violent disorder as part of widespread race rioting in the UK, the message from our legal system seems to be that causing disruption as part of peaceful climate protests is far worse than throwing bricks, setting fire to asylum hotels, and terrifying entire communities in the name of ‘British values’.

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“This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.”  –  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

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As well as new laws and vicious ‘deterrent’ sentencing, the UK has seen government attorneys challenge court rulings to minimise the legal defences available to defendants during trials, such that juries are regularly prevented from hearing WHY a protest has taken place, which might have given some context to the action. Before such rulings, juries were often persuaded to acquit defendants on the basis of a reasonable defence despite actions which might have otherwise been criminal damage or disruption.

During the Southwark trial of the Whole Truth Five climate ‘conspirators’ last month, Judge Hehir characterised climate breakdown as a matter of opinion and belief. The prosecution team asked that a statement of undisputed facts (outlining the catastrophic effects of climate change in the face of government plans to extend fossil fuel extraction) be placed as evidence in front of the jury, and Hehir had to allow it, but he then told the jury that it was not lawful for them to consider it in reaching their verdict.

The trial was observed by UN Special Rapporteur for Environmental Defenders, Michel Forst, who told Real Media he was bemused by the way the jury was sent in and out of the court over and over again, while all sorts of legal arguments went on out of their view. He said this doesn’t happen in Belgium or France, where it seems juries there are trusted to reach their own conclusions.  When the five defendants were given a total of 21 years in prison, Forst immediately issued this statement, as read here by Tim Crosland.

“Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent not just for environmental protests but for any form of peaceful protest that may at one point or another not align with the interests of the government of the day.” – Michel Forst

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THE FIGHTBACK

Today, a national petition was launched calling for the government to immediately repeal recent repressive legislation. It has already attracted 40k signatures.

Lawyers acting for the Whole Truth Five have officially launched a sentencing appeal, on the basis that the length of sentences were excessive, and that Judge Hehir not only failed to consider the UK’s obligation under the Aarhus Convention, but also characterised the real threat to human life caused by greenhouse gas emissions as mere “political speech”.

The campaign is backed in an open letter to the current Attorney General Richard Hermer KC signed by 2000 academics and cultural leaders.

Real Media has reported extensively on the fight for juries to both hear the evidence and to exercise their power, recently confirmed in the High Court, to acquit on their conscience, even when a judge tells them otherwise.

Hear barrister Paul Powlesland urging people to spread the word about the RIGHT TO ACQUIT.

Finally, campaigners have been working for the past few years to bring the real criminals to justice. After being blanked by Metropolitan Police, and going through the appropriate appeal and complaints procedures, a dossier of evidence against several political and business leaders has now been lodged at the International Criminal Court, alleging genocide by ‘oblique intent’, as explained in this video.

Although the road to international justice is likely to be long, the benefit of this approach is that it can be referred to in protest trials. The group have sent a letter to all UK judges outlining the case, and they recommend that defendants refer to it in their summing up speeches to ensure that juries are aware of it, and judges have less opportunity to shut it down.

New laws, unfair trials, pre-emptive arrests, detention without trial and harsh sentencing – all the tools of an authoritarian regime – will not avert the threat to life that climate collapse and weapons industries pose. Indeed, the more authoritarian our government becomes, and the more they try to demonise particular groups of people, the more we must fight back. For the government and judiciary to deny the real existential threat of climate collapse, or the reality of genocide in Palestine, relies on believing that people don’t care about their children or the children of others around the world. The reality is that they do.

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