UK Environmental groups to support Just Stop Oil M25 protestors appeal sentences

Olivia Barber 

Yesterday

Left Foot Forward

‘Peaceful protesters shouldn’t be locked up, period.’

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have revealed they will work together to help five Just Stop Oil activists appeal their ‘record-length’ sentences.

In July, Five Just Stop Oil activists were handed four and five-year jail sentences for joining a Zoom call to discuss a planned protest on the M25 motorway.

Founder of JSO, Roger Hallam, was sentenced to five years in prison in July while activists Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin received four-year sentences.

The protestors were sentenced under the ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’ offence which was introduced in the previous government’s draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and Public Order Act in 2022.

The two environmental groups have said they will combine their expertise to support the appellants’ cases, after the Court of Appeal granted them permission to intervene with written submissions.

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FoE) have said that the protestors’ custodial sentences are excessive, stating that they “breach human rights legislation, which requires that sentencing must be proportionate where fundamental rights, such as the right to protest*, are engaged.”

The groups said they “believe the mounting authoritarian crackdown” on peaceful protest over the climate emergency “is a serious threat to our democracy and civil liberties”.

In addition, they are calling on Labour to repeal the Conservatives’ anti-protest legislation to “help restore the UK’s once-respected tolerance for peaceful protest”.

Katie de Kauwe, senior lawyer at Friends of the Earth, said: “To be jailed for up to five years for planning a peaceful protest over the UK’s laggard progress in preventing runaway climate and ecological breakdown, shows the chilling effect of the previous government’s anti-protest laws in stifling our democracy and allowing the government of the day to curb dissent.

“In what functioning democracy can it be right for those peacefully raising the alarm about the climate crisis to receive longer jail sentences than people who participated in racially-motivated violence this summer, and deliberately targeted migrants, refugees and Muslim communities? Peaceful protesters shouldn’t be locked up, period.”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward