Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, who threw soup over Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ in October 2022 Photo: Just Stop Oil
TWO Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists who threw soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting have been found guilty of criminal damage and told to expect jail time.
Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland threw two tins of Heinz tomato soup over the painting, which is protected by glass, in October 2022.
The pair then glued themselves beneath the artwork in an action to demand the then-Tory government halt all new oil and gas projects.
Although Labour agreed with the ban and implemented it when it took government, the two activists have been told to expect prison time.
The trial at Southwark Crown Court was overseen by Judge Christopher Hehir, who handed out record sentences totalling 21 years to five activists from the group this month.
On Thursday, he found the pair guilty of criminal damage exceeding £5,000.
The National Gallery, where the artwork was displayed, previously said that there was “minor damage” to the frame, but the painting was unharmed.
At Southwark Crown Court, Judge Christopher Hehir told the pair to be “prepared in practical and emotional terms to go to prison” when they are sentenced on 27 September.
Judge Hehir said they “came within the width of a pane of glass of destroying one of the most valuable artworks in the world”.
He set bail conditions for Plummer, of Clapham in south-west London, and Holland, of Newcastle, which stipulate they must not carry glue, paint or any adhesive substance in a public place, and must not visit any galleries or museums.
The court heard how Plummer said in front of the painting in 2022: “What is worth more, art or life? Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice?
“Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?
“The cost-of-living crisis is part of the cost-of-oil crisis.”
UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention Michel Forst attended the trial of five Just Stop Oil supporters at Southwark Crown Court. He attended as an observer because of his serious concerns.
For planning to block a motorway encircling London, five Just Stop Oil activists were recently sentenced to a minimum of four years in prison.
Just Stop Oil wants to end the extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas in the UK by 2030. The group’s demands are consistent with what scientists have said is necessary to limit climate change. The same scientific advice underpins international agreements the UK has signed.
Just Stop Oil’s methods, which include stopping traffic by sitting on roads, are also peaceful. So why are its members facing a long stretch behind bars?
Such a severe sentence for non-violent protest has “no equivalent in modern times” according to Graeme Hayes and Steven Cammiss. Hayes is a reader in political sociology at Aston University while Cammiss teaches law at the University of Birmingham. Both have sat in on several high-profile climate protest cases.
Protesters facing prosecution in England and Wales were once partially protected by what’s known as Hoffman’s bargain. This maintained that the state would show restraint and offer lenient sentences to non-violent protesters deemed to be acting proportionately. Last week’s ruling seems to show that this meagre allowance is now dead.
Just Stop Oil has vowed to continue its campaign of disruptive protest.
The Court of Appeal reaffirmed that Hoffman’s bargain should apply to such cases in 2021 with a ruling that exonerated the Stansted 15, protesters who obstructed a Home Office deportation flight in 2017. However, the court rejected the Stansted 15’s “necessity defence”, the argument that they were obliged to do what they did to avoid a greater harm. This precedent has been upheld in subsequent cases, including climate protest trials.
Conspiracy to cause public nuisance, which the Just Stop Oil five were found guilty of, is a relatively new offence (introduced in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022) that carries a maximum prison term of ten years. People who feel compelled to take part in disruptive protest due to the existential threat of climate change risk a decade in jail without being able to explain their actions to a jury.
“The legal philosopher Antony Duff suggests that criminal cases are a means of holding fellow citizens to account for their behaviour,” Hayes and Cammiss say.
“A trial fails in this regard if it doesn’t let defendants account for their behaviour in ways that are meaningful to them.”
UK anti-protest law is now so restrictive that even minor concessions seem like major victories. Retired social worker Trudi Warner was cleared of contempt of court in April for holding a placard outside London’s Old Bailey, affirming the right of juries to acquit based on their conscience. The result was lauded as a “huge win for democracy” by civil liberty campaigners.
The reality is far from comforting and should in fact trouble everyone, says Emily Barritt, a senior lecturer in environmental law at King’s College London:
“Punishing protesters won’t solve the problems that they are highlighting. Lethal air, filthy rivers, collapsing food chains, the climate crisis – these problems will all continue unabated, and soon become much more inconvenient than having to get off the bus to walk the last mile to work.”
Roads are sacred, the climate less so
Should the right of motorists to travel unimpeded take precedence over a collective demand for a liveable climate? Whatever most people think, the archetypal “angry motorist” is a constituency which Britain’s political elite appear eager to woo.
Labour proclaimed itself the only party “truly on the side of drivers” at the recent election, fending off an accusation from the Conservative party that Keir Starmer had “declared war on motorists across Britain”.
Matthew Paterson, a professor of international politics at the University of Manchester, sees this as a strategy of the political right to remain relevant as the climate crisis unfolds – a bet that the public will baulk at the necessary disruption of decarbonisation.
Yet channelling Britain’s road rage did not prevent an electoral wipeout for Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives. Rebecca Willis, a professor in energy and climate governance at Lancaster University, was unsurprised.
Action on climate change commands broad public support in the UK. Dave Head/Shutterstock
“The Conservatives’ private polling must have confirmed what public opinion research has consistently told us: there are vanishingly few votes to be won through an agenda of delaying action on climate change,” she says.
Hayes and Cammiss also note the result of a snap poll which showed 61% of respondents considered the record jail sentences for the five Just Stop Oil activists too harsh.
Public consent for the UK’s crackdown on peaceful protest cannot be taken for granted. Even so, Oscar Berglund, a researcher in political economy at the University of Bristol, expects more and longer prison sentences for protesters.
“These are political sentences and climate activists [have] become political prisoners,” he wrote via email.
“Removing the politics of climate change from the courtroom doesn’t change that.”
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Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Police and Heathrow airport security were on high alert after Just Stop Oil protesters were arrested at the airport’s perimeter fence. Photograph: Kristian Buus/In Pictures/Getty Images
Ten activists arrested at Heathrow, over 30 flights cancelled at Cologne-Bonn, and planes delayed or diverted
Climate activists acting under the banner “oil kills” have glued themselves to the tarmac and grounded flights across Europe as holidaymakers attempt to make summer getaways.
In a wave of protests at airports from Oslo to Barcelona, activists disrupted flights and demanded that rich and polluting countries phase out fossil fuels by 2030. The protests, which the activists said had led to several arrests, came a day after climate scientists logged the world’s hottest day on record.
An activist taking part in the protest at Cologne-Bonn airport holds her hand glued to the runway. Photograph: Letzte Generation Handout/EPA
“Ordinary people are taking matters into their own hands today to do what our criminal governments have failed to do,” the campaign said in a statement. “We are putting our bodies on the wheels of the machine of the global fossil economy and saying ‘oil kills’.”
In Germany, protesters from the climate group Letzte Generation (Last Generation) briefly stopped flights on Wednesday morning after they cut a chain-linked fence and glued themselves to the tarmac at Cologne-Bonn airport. The airport said that 31 flights had been cancelled and six diverted.
In Austria, activists delayed a flight by refusing to sit down before takeoff while others spilled orange paint in the terminal at Vienna airport. In Switzerland, they blocked roads leading to Zürich and Geneva airports.
Protest group have confirmed plan to disrupt airports this summer
Just Stop Oil activists plotting a summer of disruption at airports vowed to use all means “necessary”, the group said on Monday.
…
“This is not a course of action undertaken lightly, however action from governments must be commensurate with the scale of the crisis faced by humanity.
“Until that is the case, it is on the conscience of every ordinary citizen to utilise whatever mechanism is available to us to non-violently pressure for necessary change.
“Just Stop Oil supporters are trained in nonviolence and will undertake all possible steps to ensure that the safety of those using airports, as well as those in the air, will not be compromised by our actions.
“This includes avoiding going on any active or inactive runways.”
Commenting on the lengthy jail sentences imposed on climate activists for planning a peaceful protest, following a trial where the defendants were prevented from fully explaining the reasons for their actions, Greenpeace UK’s programme director Amy Cameron said:
“This is a dark day for the right to protest, a pillar of our democracy. Without it, we would have no votes for women, basic workers’ rights or an end to coal and commercial whaling. 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.
Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
“These sentences are not a one-off anomaly, but the culmination of years of repressive legislation, overblown government rhetoric and a concerted assault on the right of juries to deliberate according to their conscience. This judicial crackdown on climate activists has gotten out of hand and is now a major international embarrassment. It’s part of the mess the Labour government has inherited from its predecessor and they must fix it by giving back to people the right to protest that’s been slowly being taken away from them.
“Starmer’s ministers should repeal the gagging laws brought in by the Conservatives and instruct the Attorney General to meet with campaigners and the UN rapporteur on environmental defenders to discuss a way forward.”
