As right-wing rioters attacked communities with racist violence across parts of the UK last month, 22-year-old climate activist Cressie Gethin sat in a prison cell.
Her crime? Organizing a disruptive protest against new government-granted licenses to drill for oil — a planet-heating fossil fuel — in the North Sea.
In late July, a London court found Gethin and four other members of the Just Stop Oil activist group guilty of “conspiring intentionally to cause a public nuisance,” after recruiting protesters to climb structures along the M25 — a major ring road around London — bringing traffic to a standstill in parts over four days in November 2022.
Prosecutors alleged that the protests, organized over a Zoom call, disrupted more than 700,000 drivers, caused economic damage of over £760,000 ($980,000) and racked up £1 million ($1.3m) in policing costs.
Now Gethin and three others — Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw and Lucia Whittaker-De-Abreu, who planned the disruption on the call — are serving four-year jail terms, while Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam was given five years. All are appealing.
The sentences are believed to be the longest in the UK’s history for non-violent protest and were delivered under two new controversial laws that supercharged policing powers to crack down on disruptive protests, even when they are peaceful.
They place the act of planning a “public nuisance” event, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, on a similar footing as violent crimes like robbery, for which punishments range from community service to 12 years’ jail, or rape, which is four to 19 years.
The judge — who in court referred to the activists as “extremists” — justified the long jail terms because all five activists had previously been convicted of one or more offenses in relation to direct action protest. Each were on bail for another set of proceedings when the Zoom call took place. He also noted people missed important doctor’s visits and funerals because of the protest.
But activists like Gethin say their demonstrations are proportionate to the problem at hand — a rapidly warming world that threatens to transform life as we know it, through deadly extreme weather events and by pushing ecosystems to their brinks. They are now battling the bolstered powers of the police and courts to get their point across.
“A very harsh sentence like this doesn’t make sense morally or legally — but it does make sense politically,” Gethin told CNN in a handwritten letter from HMP Bronzefield, a women’s prison just south of London’s Heathrow Airport.
The laws have drawn criticism from the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michael Forst, who said not only do they criminalize peaceful protest, but they are being enforced in “punitive and repressive” ways.
Big Oil’s donations to the UK government
Big Oil has poured money into think tanks and charities that have had an influence on climate and protest laws. At least two think tanks that have received funding from fossil fuel companies made campaign donations to the ministers overseeing the legislation. One — the right-wing Policy Exchange — drafted a report that essentially served as a blueprint for one of the laws.
Despite its plans to transition to a net-zero economy by 2050, the previous Conservative government issued hundreds of new permits to further explore the North Sea’s oil and gas reserves in 2023, against the recommendations of climate scientists and the International Energy Agency.
The recently elected center-left Labour government has pledged to stop new licenses — but the tough policing laws remain.
“It is a pretty clear message, isn’t it?” Gethin said. “’You’re demanding change that puts our power and profit at risk, so you must be stopped.’”
The laws were purpose-built to target protest groups like Just Stop Oil. The UK government explicitly pointed to disruption from the group’s predecessor, Extinction Rebellion (XR), in its rationale for formulating the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022.
The Public Order Act 2023 brought in new criminal offenses and higher fines for protesters, such as “locking-on” — where protesters cling to a place or object — and “disruptive slow marching,” usually used to block traffic.
From their inception, the policing laws — which have also been applied to anti-racism and gender-equality protests — have sparked concern among civil society groups of a creep in authoritarianism in British society. Amnesty International said they mark a “dark new era for protest rights,” and give police “license to close down almost any protest they wish.”
Jodie Beck, head of policy and campaigns at the British human rights organization Liberty, said the laws “underpin inflammatory political rhetoric around the climate movement and racial justice movement,” and “strike at the heart of how we protest.”
There have been more than 3,000 Just Stop Oil activist arrests since the group formed in 2022, according to the group. Most of those arrests have been for planning or carrying out direct actions, including slow marching. Other activists, who have defaced famous artworks and buildings, were arrested and charged with criminal damage and trespassing. Twenty-one are currently imprisoned.
The Home Office did not respond to CNN’s questions about whether the new Labour government will reevaluate the laws, but said: “We recognize the democratic right that people must be free to peacefully express their views, but they should do so within the bounds of the law.”
A think tank linked to ExxonMobil and the laws
The 2022 policing law was drafted soon after an influential right-wing think tank called Policy Exchange, which has in the past received funding from ExxonMobil, outlined XR’s protest tactics and called for the criminalization of the group, in a report that heavily influenced the new laws.
It’s unclear how much money ExxonMobil has donated to Policy Exchange over the years as charities in the UK are not required to make their funding public, but in 2017, the oil company gave $30,000 to the think tank’s US branch, according to an ExxonMobil document.
At the time, Policy Exchange was part of the Atlas Network, a US-based non-profit that supports 500 “free market” groups globally, many of which are connected to the fossil fuel industry and the proliferation of anti-protest legislation in other countries. ExxonMobil told CNN that they do not currently fund Policy Exchange or American Friends of Policy Exchange, but did not answer questions about past funding. Policy Exchange did not answer CNN’s request for comment.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/14/climate/uk-climate-protests-policing-laws-prison-intl/index.html