A petition signed by more than 1.6 million people urging the government to enforce a total ban on bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides has been handed in to the Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) by environmental campaigners [1].
The petition, which was coordinated by Greenpeace UK, has amassed a staggering 1,645,000 signatures from the British public and was delivered directly to Defra for the environment minister, Emma Hardy. It was delivered in the form of a bee hotel by campaigners dressed in ‘worker’ bee outfits carrying placards reading, ‘Pesticides Buzz Off’, ‘Protect Our Bees’ and ‘Bee Safe’. They were joined by Siân Berry, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, who is a supporter of the campaign.
Separately, 15 leading climate and nature charities – including Pesticide Action Network, RSPB, Wildlife Trusts and Greenpeace – have written to the environment minister, calling for an end to the emergency authorisation of neonicotinoids on sugar beet crops [2].
In the letter they state: “By not allowing another emergency use of neonicotinoids, there will be more incentive for British Sugar and the government to fund research into alternatives, and to adopt nature-friendly farming approaches including Integrated Pest Management (IPM).”
Greenpeace UK’s campaigner, Anthony Lewis, said: “Using neonicotinoids to ‘protect’ crops is like setting fire to your house to protect it from burglars. Yes, it will destroy pests, but it will also kill bees and other vital pollinators we depend on for the food we’re trying to grow. It’s absurd.
“Bee populations have been decimated over recent years, with the use of neonicotinoids one of the drivers of this decline. As leading environmental charities and experts on nature protection, along with 1.6 million members of the public, we implore the government to implement a full and final ban on the use of all bee-killing pesticides once and for all.”
Bees are essential for our survival – pollinating much of our food and playing a critical role in sustaining ecosystems around the world. However, wild bee populations have fallen by a third, with the use of pesticides on farms a key contributor to their rapid decline.
The use of neonicotinoids, which are particularly lethal to bees and other vital pollinators, was outlawed across Europe in 2018. However, despite the ban, the previous UK government approved the ‘emergency’ authorisation of these deadly chemicals for four years in a row, against the scientific advice of the government’s own Expert Committee on Pesticides.
Black bees
During its election campaign, the Labour Party made a commitment to end these exemptions for bee-killing pesticides and the government announced last month that it was drawing up plans to outlaw the use of some neonicotinoids. However, whatever the proposals being brought forward in future, another ‘emergency’ derogation could be allowed. A decision on whether to grant this emergency authorisation again this year is expected imminently.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has dropped all charges against 34 Greenpeace activists who blockaded Unilever’s London headquarters last September. The decision was made just days before the start of what would have been the largest ‘locking on’ trials ever seen in the UK.
Eight protesters had been facing charges of Aggravated Trespass and a further 26 protesters were charged with the new offence of ‘locking-on’ introduced in the Public Order Act 2023. The letter from the CPS said the charges were dropped because “there is not enough evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction”. The first trials were due to begin on 15 January at City of London Magistrates’ Court.
The charges related to 5 September 2024 when Greenpeace activists blockaded the entrances to Unilever House in protest at the firm’s ongoing failure to tackle plastic pollution. Climbers scaled the building and attached a huge artwork to the outside wall. Activists also blocked the entrances to the building, locking themselves onto large models of the company’s flagship Dove products and a ‘Dead Dove’ parody of the company logo.
Will McCallum, Co-Executive Director of Greenpeace UK said: “This is a bolt of good news in an otherwise bleak landscape for protest rights. Our activists were facing a combined total of up to 15 years in prison for standing up to one of the world’s largest plastic polluters. The invented crime of ‘locking-on’ is just one new tool in a well-stocked legal arsenal that is being used to stifle dissent and send peaceful protesters to jail. Previous governments brought in these laws and powers, but the responsibility lies with Keir Starmer to end their chilling effect on democracy and repeal them.”
The crime of ‘locking-on’ was one of a number of offences and powers created by recent Conservative governments to crack down on peaceful protest. It has resulted in hundreds of protesters being arrested, often for as little as walking down a street. Last year saw five climate activists sentenced to a total of 21 years in prison for taking part in a Zoom call to discuss a planned protest.
Greenpeace’s protest was part of an ongoing campaign against Unilever after the corporate giant announced a major rollback of plastic reduction targets last year. A Greenpeace International report showed that it was the largest corporate seller of single-use plastic sachets, selling the equivalent of 1,700 a second.
Daniel Jones, interim head of Greenpeace’s plastics campaign, said: “This is an important milestone in our campaign against Dove’s toxic brand of beauty. We reluctantly staged our protest last September after months of failed talks with Unilever and multiple attempts to raise our concerns in other ways. Since then, Unilever has come back to the table and has begun playing a more constructive role in negotiations for a Global Plastics Treaty. We won’t stop until the company commits to reducing plastic production – particularly of its super-polluting plastic sachets.”
‘Locking-on’ involves protesters attaching themselves to another person, building or object to make it harder for police to remove them. It has long been used as a tactic by protesters, including by the Suffragettes. The Public Order Act 2023 contained the new offences of locking-on and being ‘equipped for locking on’.
Climate and environmental protest is being criminalised and repressed around the world. The criminalisation of such protest has received a lot of attention in certain countries, including the UK and Australia. But there have not been any attempts to capture the global trend – until now.
We recently published a report, with three University of Bristol colleagues, which shows this repression is indeed a global trend – and that it is becoming more difficult around the world to stand up for climate justice.
This criminalisation and repression spans the global north and south, and includes more and less democratic countries. It does, however, take different forms.
Our report distinguishes between climate and environmental protest. The latter are campaigns against specific environmentally destructive projects – most commonly oil and gas extraction and pipelines, deforestation, dam building and mining. They take place all around the world.
Climate protests are aimed at mitigating climate change by decreasing carbon emissions, and tend to make bigger policy or political demands (“cut global emissions now” rather than “don’t build this power plant”). They often take place in urban areas and are more common in the global north.
The intensifying criminalisation and repression is taking four main forms.
1. Anti-protest laws are introduced
Anti-protest laws may give the police more powers to stop protest, introduce new criminal offences, increase sentence lengths for existing offences, or give policy impunity when harming protesters. In the 14 countries we looked at, we found 22 such pieces of legislation introduced since 2019.
2. Protest is criminalised through prosecution and courts
This can mean using laws against climate and environmental activists that were designed to be used against terrorism or organised crime. In Germany, members of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a direct action group in the mould of Just Stop Oil, were charged in May 2024 with “forming a criminal organisation”. This section of the law is typically used against mafia organisations and had never been applied to a non-violent group.
Criminalising protest can also mean lowering the threshold for prosecution, preventing climate activists from mentioning climate change in court, and changing other court processes to make guilty verdicts more likely. Another example is injunctions that can be taken out by corporations against activists who protest against them.
3. Harsher policing
This stretches from stopping and searching to surveillance, arrests, violence, infiltration and threatening activists. The policing of activists is carried out not just by state actors like police and armed forces, but also private actors including private security, organised crime and corporations.
In Germany, regional police have been accused of collaborating with an energy giant (and its private fire brigade) to evict coal mine protesters, while private security was used extensively in policing anti-mining activists in Peru.
4. Killings and disappearances
Lastly, in the most extreme cases, environmental activists are murdered. This is an extension of the trend for harsher policing, as it typically follows threats by the same range of actors. We used data from the NGO Global Witness to show this is increasingly common in countries including Brazil, Philippines, Peru and India. In Brazil, most murders are carried out by organised crime groups while in Peru, it is the police force.
Protests are increasing
To look more closely at the global picture of climate and environmental protest – and the repression of it – we used the Armed Conflicts Location Event database. This showed us that climate protests increased dramatically in 2018-2019 and have not declined since. They make up on average about 4% of all protest in the 81 countries that had more than 1,000 protests recorded in the 2012-2023 period:
Climate protests increased sharply in the late 2010s in the 14 countries studied. (Data is smoothed over five months; number of protests is per country per month.) Berglund et al; Data: ACLED, CC BY-SA
This second graph shows that environmental protest has increased more gradually:
Environmental protests in the same 14 countries. Data: ACLED, CC BY-SA
We used this data to see what kind of repression activists face. By looking for keywords in the reporting of protest events, we found that on average 3% of climate and environmental protests face police violence, and 6.3% involve arrests. But behind these averages are large differences in the nature of protest and its policing.
A combination of the presence of protest groups like Extinction Rebellion, who often actively seek arrests, and police forces that are more likely to make arrests, mean countries such as Australia and the UK have very high levels of arrest. Some 20% of Australian climate and environmental protests involve arrests, against 17% in the UK – with the highest in the world being Canada on 27%.
Meanwhile, police violence is high in countries such as Peru (6.5%) and Uganda (4.4%). France stands out as a European country with relatively high levels of police violence (3.2%) and low levels of arrests (also 3.2%).
In summary, while criminalisation and repression does not look the same across the world, there are remarkable similarities. It is increasing in a lot of countries, it involves both state and corporate actors, and it takes many forms.
This repression is taking place in a context where states are not taking adequate action on climate change. By criminalising activists, states depoliticise them. This conceals the fact these activists are ultimately right about the state of the climate and environment – and the lack of positive government action in these areas.
Activists from Just Stop Oil hanging a banner above the M25
ENVIRONMENTAL groups Friends of the Earth (FoE) and Greenpeace UK will intervene in appeals challenging sentences given to climate protesters who blocked the M25.
Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were jailed in July.
Mr Hallam, co-founder of Just Stop Oil, was sentenced to five years while the other four protesters received four-year sentences for disrupting traffic by climbing motorway gantries in November 2022.
The appeal will be heard on January 29-30, 2025, alongside cases involving 16 other Just Stop Oil activists.
FoE argues the sentences breach human rights laws and is calling for “proportionate” penalties for protesters.
The group’s senior lawyer, Katie de Kauwe, said the sentences “show the chilling effect of the previous government’s anti-protest laws in stifling our democracy and allowing the government of the day to curb dissent.”
She said: “In what functioning democracy can it be right for those peacefully raising the alarm about the climate crisis to receive longer jail sentences than people who participated in racially motivated violence this summer, and deliberately targeted migrants, refugees and Muslim communities?
“Peaceful protesters shouldn’t be locked up, period.”
