Climate protests and repression:the convictions of Just Stop Oil and the future of activism

Criminal conspiracy aimed at disturbing the peace.Five Just Stop Oil activists, including one of its co-founders, 58-year-old Roger Hallam, on July 18 were sentenced to unprecedented prison terms for planning to block the M25 motorway in November 2022:a Zoom call was sufficient for the conviction which, according to the sentence, demonstrated "the intricate planning and sophistication of the disruptive action" and constituted "irrefutable proof" of the existence of a criminal conspiracy.

Hallam received a five-year sentence, while the other four – Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin  – were sentenced to four years each.The sentences are the longest ever handed out in the UK for non-violent protests, surpassing those given to fellow Just Stop Oil activists, Morgan Trowland (three years) and Marcus Decker (two years and seven months), for climbing the Dartford Crossing .

For four consecutive days, from 7 to 11 November, Just Stop Oil activists had blocked traffic along the M25, a busy motorway that surrounds most of the London area.According to the prosecution lawyers, these protests caused over 50 thousand hours of delay, affecting more than 7 thousand vehicles, and caused damage and inconvenience to those who remained stranded on the motorway:there were those who missed flights, those who missed medical appointments, those who were unable to take exams or meet any other type of important commitment.There was also a small accident involving a truck and a police officer who, thrown from his motorbike, suffered a concussion and some bruises.The prosecution estimated the overall economic cost of the blockade at "at least 750 thousand pounds [nearly 900 thousand euros], with the Metropolitan Police bearing a cost of over 1.1 million pounds [about 1.3 million euros]".

However, the five activists were not convicted for taking part in the protest but for planning it.On November 2, 2022, five days before the highway blockade began, all five members of Just Stop Oil participated in a Zoom call where they discussed how the protests would unfold and what would be done.The contents of this meeting were disclosed by a journalist from Sun who had managed to participate in the call by pretending to be interested in the protests.Immediately after participating in the online meeting, the journalist from Sun had alerted the police to the plan and turned over all the material collected to them, as the journalist himself explains in an article published in the British tabloid last July 19th, the day after the sentence:

“As soon as I logged off after the meeting, it was clear that the evidence I had obtained was overwhelming.The next morning I sent my records to the Metropolitan Police and National Highways, as the protest was due to start the following Monday.The police arrested most of the leaders at dawn.”

During the trial the journalist then clarified that despite being a journalist, he had preferred to sacrifice the news to public safety:“I'm a journalist, so obviously I care about the stories, but I care immensely about public safety and I turned in the videos [ed, to the police] as soon as possible."

The prosecution used this evidence against the activists as proof that there was a conspiracy.There was "extensive organization and planning" of the protests and each defendant played a "significant role" in the conspiracy, prosecuting lawyer Jocelyn Ledward said in court.At the meeting, Hallam said they intended to provoke "the biggest disruption in the modern history of the UK", in an attempt to force the government to agree to Just Stop Oil's core demand - an end to new oil exploration and gas in the North Sea.

The activists were convicted of conspiring to intentionally cause public disorder.While recognizing that there is scientific and social consensus that the man-made climate crisis is underway and that action must be taken to avoid it, and that "at least some of the concerns that motivate it are, at least in part, shared by many", in handing down the sentence, Judge Christopher Hehir said that all those convicted had “long since crossed the line between awareness-raising and fanaticism”.

“Your fanaticism makes you completely careless about the rights of your fellow citizens.You have taken on the responsibility of deciding that your fellow citizens should suffer inconvenience and harm, and how much inconvenience and harm they should suffer, simply so that you can present your opinions,” the judge said.

“I want to remind the Court once again that the reasons that led me to act were not beliefs or opinions.Earth's life support systems are being destroyed by human activities, believe it or not.These are not beliefs or opinions.I deeply regret that this action was necessary...I maintain that it was necessary and that my actions are the most effective option available to me,” Cressida Gethin said during the hearing.

But the judge ruled that the jury should not have considered evidence about the climate crisis, which the defendants wanted to cite as the primary motivation for their actions and which they said constituted reasonable mitigation.

The sentence raised the question of the effectiveness and usefulness of these protest actions for the climate cause and made us reflect once more on the criminalization of dissent when it comes to climate activism.

“It's a dark day for peaceful environmental protests” in the UK, said the United Nations special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst.“Judgments like this set a very dangerous precedent, not only for environmental protests, but for any form of peaceful protest that may, at one time or another, not align with the interests of the government of the day.”

Amnesty International UK Human Rights Advisor Tom Southerden called the sentence “draconian”:“Such long prison sentences of this kind for people seeking climate justice should raise the alert about the ongoing crackdown on peaceful protests in this country, which violates all our human rights.”

However, explain Graeme Hayes (reader of Political Sociology at Aston University) and Steven Cammiss (associate professor at the University of Birmingham law school) on The Conversation, there is not much to be surprised about:These sentences are the logical result of Britain's authoritarian turn towards protests over the past five years.

In the past, protests in England and Wales were dealt with by the courts under the so-called “Hoffmann Pact”, whereby protesters admitted their responsibilities in court, but their civic sense – along with the democratic cause they were protesting for – he was rewarded with lenient sentences.

The “Hoffmann Pact” was in fact surpassed with the Trial of the Stansted 15, accused and found guilty of terrorism-related crimes for stopping a flight that would have repatriated a group of migrants in 2017.The fifteen were sentenced to community service, fines and, in some cases, short prison terms.In 2021, the Court of Appeal rejected the charges but, at the same time, tightened the courts' general approach towards protests, limiting the use of legitimate mitigating factors (i.e. the reasons for the protest).

Meanwhile, the last government has introduced new, more restrictive laws, notably the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022) and the Public Order Act (2023), while judges have reduced the time defendants have in court to explain their reasons and the terms on which juries can judge.Indeed, although juries still have the power to find defendants not guilty, making a moral rather than legal decision, this is much more difficult and rare.

In the trial against the Just Stop Oil activists we saw the effects of all these changes apply.“By not allowing defendants to adequately account for their actions, courts create an artificial separation between law and politics and diminish the democratic power of juries,” observe Hayes and Cammiss, who add:“By sentencing nonviolent protesters to prison terms, courts are imposing authoritarian responses to pressing social problems.”

In an article on Guardian, environmentalist Chris Packham and green energy industrialist Dave Vince (often critical of Just Stop Oil's methods) wrote:“These activists can be annoying.They could give you an earache.We might want them to tone it down.But in a democratic society, their place is not in prison.We must listen to them, not lock them away."

However, despite much pressure, Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to intervene, effectively confirming that separation between law and politics that Hayes and Cammiss talk about.“The Prime Minister is very clear that when it comes to these cases, sentences and sentences are a matter for independent judges,” his spokeswoman said.

“The fight against the climate crisis is a fight for a more just world.”The commitment of climate scientists furious with politics

There is an image of this trial that photographs this split between law and politics, politics and society, institutions and sense of the time we are living in and it is the moment in which the judge, during the hearing, recognizes the scientific and social consensus on anthropogenic climate change and, at the same time, removes the climate crisis from the issues on which the court should have ruled, reducing the activists' requests (on which the judge himself had admitted that there is a scientific consensus) to "opinions", classifying non-violent protest actions as "fanaticism" and preventing the jury from being able to express its opinion on the reasons for the protests.In summary, man-made climate change is real, but it must be expunged from the merits of the trial to judge the non-violent protests of those demonstrating for the climate cause.Once the reasons why activists protest have been removed, only questions of public order remain.With more severe prison sentences than for more serious crimes and disproportionate to the contested acts.

The British case is not isolated and concerns all of Europe, as we wrote in this article.“European countries must end the repression and criminalization of peaceful climate protests,” declared the United Nations special rapporteur for environmental defenders, Forst, a few months ago.

The policy that criminalizes nonviolent civil disobedience by climate activists

Civil disobedience – writes Federico Zuolo, author of the book “Disobedience.If, how, when” (Laterza, 2024) – is “a communicative action that seeks to draw the attention of politics and the majority to a problem otherwise not seen and underestimated” and must be understood “as an extreme form of democratic communication when other legal channels have proven useless."

We saw it with the case of Ultima Generazione (he talked about it here Marisandra Lizzi):the act of disobedience is performed as a last resort, after more traditional and legal avenues have been pursued without success.After years in which the protest movement against inaction towards climate change seemed to have reached millions of people, culminating in mass participation in the Fridays for Future, the pandemic lockdown brought everything back.Yet the climate issue is a fundamental urgency.And faced with political inertia and blindness towards the future - the activists argue - the only way left to make themselves heard has been, in the last year and a half, civil disobedience with sensational and symbolic actions.

Climate change:the Extinction Rebellion movement and civil disobedience as a weapon of pressure on governments

And it is precisely for this reason that the sentence against the Just Stop Oil activists can have a disruptive effect on the non-violent protests of climate activists:when the judge separated the reasons why activists demonstrate (the climate cause) from the protest actions, making it a question of public order, he effectively weakened the act of civil disobedience, emptied of its communicative power.Furthermore, the sentence constitutes a deterrent for those who want to demonstrate in the future.

And so the question remains, how can and should we carry out political battles in contemporary democracies, in a moment of great crisis of representation and in the presence of an increasingly profound gap between politics and civil society, with the institutions and governments that, on the one hand, they must respond to the increasingly peremptory and stringent tones of scientific research and, on the other, they mediate with the corporate interests of the oil & gas industry which – how writes Ferdinando Cotugno on Tomorrow – “has decided to completely erase responsibility for the future from its strategic considerations”?“What alternatives are we leaving to what remains of the climate movement that just five years ago was being hailed as the greatest political innovation of this century, the kids coming to save us from ourselves”?

Preview image via Guardian