In the UK, a dangerous escalation in the criminalisation of climate protests

Last week, record prison sentences were handed down to five British climate activists who organised a multi-day protest on the M25, the motorway that circles London. Four of them were sentenced to four years in prison each. The fifth, Roger Hallam, was given five years in prison. These sentences represent an alarming escalation in the criminalisation of climate protests, in the UK and beyond.

The sentences are a direct result of a series of anti-protest laws passed by the previous Conservative government, which were heavily criticised by human rights groups, the United Nations and climate scientists. Some of the new laws are still being challenged in the UK courts by the human rights non-governmental organisation Liberty. The new laws cover policing, sentencing and the ability of juries to find defendants not guilty.

On the policing front, the police now have much broader powers to break up protests when they start and to prevent them from starting. In terms of sentencing, last week’s sentences marked a shift away from longer sentences, but new laws allow for even harsher sentences. The courts have also made significant changes that have made it much more likely that non-violent activists will be imprisoned. The defences that protesters previously used – such as claiming the necessity of the act and having a lawful excuse for their actions – have been restricted. The absence of such defences has in turn led judges to prevent defendants from describing their motives to juries, thereby reducing the likelihood that juries will acquit on the basis of their conscience.

These developments have led to a perverse situation in which the climate crisis cannot be taken into account by the courts while increasing numbers of environmental activists are put on trial. This removes the key piece of the political puzzle in what environmental activists see as political trials.

The fact that the British justice system seeks to exclude politics from the courts does not remove the politics that brought activists to court in the first place. It is useful to consider these political considerations in their entirety to better understand these sentences.

The climate crisis is being felt around the world, with extreme temperatures, floods, droughts, wildfires, and many other negative impacts. It is worth noting that if the world were to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 or 2060, which are the most common national targets, the world would continue to warm until then. And while we are already in a climate crisis, the prospect of another quarter-century of warming is frightening. National and international climate policy bodies are increasingly desperate, pointing out that countries are far from being on track to implement the policies that would help them reach these carbon neutrality goals.

So many people around the world are rightly worried and do not trust governments to avert the civilisational threats that the IPCC reports warn of. It is this very rational, science-based desperation that motivates people to become climate activists. No such reasoning is now admissible in the British courts.

Those who justify these unprecedentedly harsh sentences tend not to deny these motivations, but to ignore them. They often claim that people have the right to protest, but not to disrupt people’s lives.

It is of symbolic and political significance that the harshest sentence has been handed down to Roger Hallam. Hallam is one of the most prominent and influential climate activists in Europe in recent years. He was a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and the architect of its civil disobedience tactics. He also went on to co-found Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil. The disruptive tactics of these groups have since spread to many other countries, mainly in Europe.

The criminalisation of protest in the UK was, in many ways, a response to the tactics advocated by Hallam. But it has not been in the interests of the British people. Last year, my colleagues and I commissioned YouGov to conduct a poll on Just Stop Oil, their call to suspend oil and gas licences, and what kind of sentence would be appropriate for non-violent disruptive protest. The poll showed us that while Just Stop Oil is very unpopular (68% unfavourable) and people are divided on their policy demand to ban new oil and gas projects in the UK North Sea Territory (31% for to 42% against), only 29% of respondents want prison sentences and only 6% want sentences of more than a year for taking part in “non-violent but disruptive protest, such as blocking a road”. A poll conducted by the Social Change Lab on the day of the sentencing found that 61% of respondents thought the sentences were too harsh.

The criminalisation of protests in the UK has been encouraged by the far-right think tank Policy Exchange, which published a report in 2019 called Extremism Rebellion advocating the criminalisation of climate activism. This report was instrumental in the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, one of the new laws applied to climate protesters. Policy Exchange is not exactly a neutral actor when it comes to climate policy; it is partly funded by the fossil fuel industry.

In recent years, I have disagreed with Roger Hallam on many points: his cherry-picking of climate science; his focus on disruptive protest as the basis of political movements, rather than as a tactic that can be used in certain circumstances; his insistence on arrest as a necessity and a goal in itself, as opposed to something that can happen to you when you protect the environment by participating in direct action; and finally, his excessive focus on (potentially misguided) tactics at the expense of strategy. But there is no doubt that Hallam and other climate activists who have been imprisoned in recent years have the world’s best interests at heart. We can disagree with some or all of what they do, but we cannot reasonably disagree with their motivations without descending into forms of science denialism.

The criminalization of climate protesters poses a grave threat to the climate and to our democratic systems. It seeks to shield political forces that are slow to act on climate change from proper challenge. And it does so by eroding essential human and political rights that have long been part of liberal democratic systems.