Environmental activists sentenced to years in prison over UK highway protest

By Sharon Braithwaite and Sophie Tanno, CNN

(CNN) — Five activists of the Just Stop Oil environmental campaign have been handed prison sentences for their involvement in organizing protests that blocked a major London highway in 2022, PA media reported, sparking a wave of criticism from climate advocates.

‘Just Stop Oil’ co-founder Roger Hallam, 58, Daniel Shaw, 38, Louise Lancaster, 58, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35, and Cressida Gethin, 22, agreed to cause disruption to traffic by having protesters climb onto gantries over the M25 highway that encircles London for four successive days in November 2022, Judge Christopher Hehir said at the sentencing hearing at a court in the British capital on Thursday, according to the UK news agency.

Hallam was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment while the remaining four defendants were each handed four years in prison each.

The climate justice group, which demands the UK government forge an international, legally binding treaty to end the extraction and burning of oil and coal by 2030, has staged high-profile protests in recent years – including spray painting cultural heritage sites, targeting pieces of artwork and disrupting major sporting events.

Prosecutors alleged the 2022 protests, which saw 45 people climb up the gantries, led to an economic cost of at least £765,000, while the cost to the Metropolitan Police was more than £1.1 million (around $1.4 million), PA reported.

The protest caused more than 50,000 hours of vehicle delay, affecting more than 700,000 vehicles, and left the M25 “compromised” for more than 120 hours, prosecutors also alleged, according to PA. The judge said that the activists “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.”

Prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward KC noted that a police officer suffered concussion and bruising after being knocked off his motorbike in traffic caused by one of the protests on November 9, 2022, PA reported.

‘Obscene perversion of justice’

The sentences have drawn criticism from environmental agencies and scientists.

Just Stop Oil described the decision as “an obscene perversion of justice.”

In a statement issued by the activist group, Bill McGuire, a professor at University College London, said that “the trial and verdict were a farce.”

“They mark a low point in British justice and they were an assault on free speech. The judge’s characterisation 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.”

Greenpeace UK’s programme director Amy Cameron called the outcome a “dark day for the right to protest, a pillar of our democracy.”

She added: “What sort of country locks people away for years for planning a peaceful demonstration, let alone for talking about it on a Zoom call? We’re giving a free hand to the polluting elite robbing us of a habitable planet while jailing those who’re trying to stop them – it makes no sense.”

Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, called the trial and verdict a “farce.”

He continued: “They mark a low point in British justice and they were an assault on free speech. The judge’s characterisation 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.”

Sir David King, the government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, labeled the sentences as “disgraceful.”

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