Kara Fox, CNN
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….
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/14/climate/uk-climate-protests-policing-laws-prison-intl/index.html
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