protest intolerance

Hundreds gather in Parliament Square as 21 now imprisoned for demanding climate action 

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Hundreds gathered in Parliament Square on Saturday in solidarity with the 21 political prisoners currently incarcerated for demanding an end to the fossil fuel era, as well as all political prisoners fighting for change in the UK and abroad, including two imprisoned for taking action with Palestine Action. In recent weeks Just Stop Oil has been taking action with groups internationally to demand governments establish a fossil fuel treaty, to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. 

Supporters of Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Defend our Juries and Fossil Free London, gathered at the Gandhi statue in Parliament Square. The crowd heard speeches from a range of speakers and messages from those currently in prison. Attendees could be seen holding signs which read ‘You can’t lock up the Truth’ and ‘No Justice when Juries are Denied the Truth.’ After the rally, many attendees joined the Palestinian solidarity march in London, in resistance to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

One of those speaking at the rally today was Raj Chada, a lawyer who has represented many of these 21 political prisoners in court. He said:

“This is about the nature of our democracy, in which peaceful protestors are routinely being imprisoned now. In the Supreme Court, a few years ago, they said that ‘protest was the lifeblood of our democracy.’ Our democracy is on its knees then, because they are not paying attention to protest.” 

“I have been doing this job now for 20 years and until 3 years ago, I hadn’t had one client imprisoned. Something has changed in the establishment. In the shadow of this [Gandhi] statue, it shows the importance of nonviolent action and what it can achieve and why it should be so important. We will continue that fight for as long as we possibly can.”

Raj Chada appears in this video.

My anaysis – dizzy – is that the fossil fuel industry has bought these laws by financing think tanks and lobbying organisations and that judges are blatently biased, not even pretending to be neutral and impartial. If you routinely use private transport to travel even moderate distances, you should expect to be occasionally delayed. Driving delays of hours are commonplace. For consistency shouldn’t people causing delays by conducting road works or having an accident also be imprisoned for many years FFS? It is overwhelmingly biased and punitive. How did some of these harsh judges get to try so many JSO trials?

later ed: The argument that people causing delays by roadworks or having an accident should be imprisoned is strengthened by the fact that motivations are not considered relevant.

7/8/24 Apologies, I can and should do better that my ‘analysis’ above. The argument about imprisoning for roadworks or accidents: The point I’m making is that since motivations are not considered relevant in trials of climate protesters then what is left is the effect: delays to private vehicle users and delays are also caused by roadworks and accidents. I wonder if that’s clear, can be followed.

Continue ReadingHundreds gather in Parliament Square as 21 now imprisoned for demanding climate action 

The extreme broadness of ‘extremism’

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Image of a Just Stop Oil participant getting arrested at Kingsbury oil terminal.
A Just Stop Oil participant getting arrested at Kingsbury oil terminal. A JSO / Vladamir Morozov image.

Original article republished from Freedom under Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. There are other interesting articles at this site that is new to me.

Just Stop Oil are being branded “fanatics” for disruptive actions whose like hardly raised an eyebrow a decade ago

I wasn’t terribly surprised to see, in the weekend Morning Star, a letter suggesting that while the sentencing of the Just Stop Oil Five was overly harsh, they deserved punishment for their conspiracy to disrupt traffic on the M25.

The Star is, to be fair, generally quite supportive of JSO’s right to protest, while having some knee-jerk types in its readership, particularly in the crusty old tankie set.  But such complaints get at the heart of an issue JSO has had for some time — they’re often really annoying even for their nominal allies. 

Many of them are quite posh and can sound patronising or smug. Their targets are disruptive but less often to the wealthy and more to a cross-class cohort of art lovers, or pagans, or sports enthusiasts, or holiday makers. And motorists, of course. Roger Hallam, as their most famous face, often acts like a self-aggrandising edgelord whose projects have a habit of getting people in trouble without much of a plan for long-term support.

It sometimes makes JSO hard to love, and it gives grouches in politics and the media an excuse to label them attention seekers, or cultists, or extremists.  

But here’s the thing: for all their PR controversies, JSO aren’t actually extreme at all, and not only in comparison to, say, cops throwing their weight around on a Friday night, or any major event that gridlocks a city centre. Comparing them to similar campaigns from the 1990s or even the early 2000s, JSO are tamer than Lassie. The anti-roads movement, Animal Liberation Front, Earth First!, Reclaim The Streets, even Greenpeace — have all mounted considerably more disruptive campaigns within living memory. You can find reports on some of them in old issues of Freedom and Schnews.

In fact, a quick look through the latter’s archive for mentions of the M25 very quickly turns up this article from 2012, with the Tories already in power, which notes the following action:

On Monday 16th July a Greenpeace co-ordinated swoop saw seventy-seven petrol stations within the M25 shut down, and another thirteen in Edinburgh - hitting Shell on the forecourt and in their pockets. Activists disassembled the emergency fuel shut off switches and chained the pumps together, stopping business for the day.

Twelve years ago, shutting down nearly the entire refuelling system around London and Edinburgh wasn’t considered big enough to fluster the Graun, which reported the whole thing as just another news story for the day. Shell were careful to say they respected the protesters’ views, and the police didn’t even bother to comment! My goodness what a difference a few years makes. Can you imagine the level of dribbling outrage the press would indulge in now? 

This impressive gap in the treatment of disruptive protests on the same road is symptomatic of an issue touched on in a recent Freedom discussion, which has been worsening for a long time and accelerated, strangely, alongside the culture wars. While the left was accused of going woke and indulging in cancel culture, the right was becoming so pathetically unable to handle confrontation that it changed the laws to jail people for being annoying. Part of Suella Braverman’s anti-protest law (since struck down) literally gave police the power to break up protests for being “too noisy”. 

And now we’re at the point where Hallam and co. are being jailed for 4-5 years each for conspiracy to disrupt the flow of traffic. But what’s worse is they’ve managed to somehow convince the public this is all a response to sudden rising environmental “fanaticism” entailing behaviour we’ve never seen before. A straight-up bald faced lie to a population who, if they are adults, should be able to personally remember examples of this not being the case which has nevertheless sunk in as truth. What a stunning propaganda victory! If the left had done it, you can bet your life the word “Orwellian” would be burning holes in printing presses across the nation.

Which brings us back to our letter writer in the Star. The left (and of course the anarchists) need to remember our history, and why it is that solidarity applies even to people we don’t get on with ideologically (or personally). We need to be much, much better at getting our heads out of our arses and fighting back against the demonisation of disruptive protest. It’s not a matter of whether we approve of JSO or Roger the Public Nuisance, or whether think their work is counterproductive in terms of public opinion. 

Because not too long ago what they’ve been doing wouldn’t have been a jailable offence, or even a front page one. Not too long ago, columnists opining about disruptive protest being “anti-democratic” would have been quite rightly ridiculed for their lack of commitment to human rights. JSO’s re-designation as extremists courting much-deserved jail time is our re-designation.

Kier Starmer needs to be pressured on this from all sides. He has, after all, taken away the left’s voice in Parliament. Now he needs to hear it in the streets.    

~ Rob Ray

Original article republished from Freedom under Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. There are other interesting articles at this site that is new to me.

Health for Extinction Rebellion protests at JP Morgan Chase’s London Embankment offices 19 October 2023.
Health for Extinction Rebellion protests at JP Morgan Chase’s London Embankment offices 19 October 2023.
Continue ReadingThe extreme broadness of ‘extremism’

Greenpeace urges govt to restore right to protest

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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.
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.”

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Morning Star Editorial: ‘Raise the watchword, Liberty’ — and wake up to today’s brutish, authoritarian Britain

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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.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/raise-watchword-liberty-and-wake-todays-brutish-authoritarian-britain

…

Silencing defendants is the courtroom parallel to the wider attack on protest rights by the last government, including the “public nuisance” offence the Just Stop Oil five have been found guilty of and other measures that allow the police to shut down demonstrations before they have even begun, or haul peaceful citizens off marches for carrying placards or wearing imagery they object to.

Both reveal the collapse of ruling-class confidence in the people they rule. Grasping, after the shocks of Brexit and the Corbyn movement, that people are deeply dissatisfied with the system, their only answer is to ban protest and silence dissidents.

We cannot be silenced. The stakes are too high: as the Just Stop Oil cause illustrates, climate change, in the form of erratic weather, increasingly severe droughts and floods and crop failure, is already upon us. British farms saw a 19 per cent income drop in the last year because of mass flooding. The disruption to our lives from upsets to food production and the water supply will outweigh that from halting traffic on a motorway. The five must be freed.

Labour in power has a chance to change course from the crazy authoritarianism of the Tories. It is committed to restoring workers’ strike rights — but it must be made to restore protest rights too. Like the Tolpuddle Martyrs, we must “raise the watchword, liberty,” defying a state that tramples on our freedoms.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/raise-watchword-liberty-and-wake-todays-brutish-authoritarian-britain

Continue ReadingMorning Star Editorial: ‘Raise the watchword, Liberty’ — and wake up to today’s brutish, authoritarian Britain

UK Climate Campaigners Get ‘Utterly Disproportionate’ Sentences

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Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

An activist puts up a banner reading “Just Stop Oil” atop an electronic traffic sign along M25 on November 10, 2022 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

“Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest,” a U.N. official said.

In a decision that one United Nations official called “beyond comprehension,” a U.K. judge on Thursday sentenced five Just Stop Oil activists to a combined 21 years in prison over a Zoom call in which they discussed plans to disrupt London’s orbital M25 highway.

The sentences are believed to be the longest on record for nonviolent protest in U.K. history, The Guardian reported.

“The sentences handed to the five Just Stop Oil campaigners are utterly disproportionate,” environmentalist and author George Monbiot wrote on social media. “Four and five years in prison for peaceful protest? This is what you might expect in Russia or Egypt, not in a supposed democracy.”

“Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?”

The five activists—Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin—were found guilty last week of conspiring to cause a public nuisance due to a four-day direct action protest on the M25 that Just Stop Oil ultimately held in November 2022. All of the defendants participated in a Zoom call in which they planned to recruit volunteers for the protest, which was intended to pressure the U.K. government to end oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, a policy that the incoming Labour government has now adopted. The Zoom call had been infiltrated by a Sun journalist, who shared its contents with the Metropolitan Police.

On Thursday, Judge Christopher Hehir sentenced Hallam to five years in prison and Shaw, Lancaster, De Abreu, and Gethin to four each.

The sentences sparked outrage from humans rights advocates and environmental campaigners.

Michel Forst, U.N. special rapporteur on environmental defenders who also observed part of the trial, said the sentencing “marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders, and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom.”

Forst added: “Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest that may, at one point or another, not align with the interests of the government of the day.”

Former Green Party leader and Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas called the sentences “obscene.”

“Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?” she asked on social media.

Current Deputy Leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said: “‘Conspiracy to commit a public nuisance’ is a deeply authoritarian description that should send shivers down the spine of all of us who want to live in a free society. Even worse when the real crime is consecutive governments who have played down the climate emergency.”

Campaigners and experts also criticized the trial itself, in which Hehir did not allow the defendants to present evidence about the climate crisis to explain their actions.

“Defendants should be allowed to explain why they have decided to use nonconventional but yet peaceful forms of action, like civil disobedience, when they engage in environmental protest,” Forst told The Guardian after attending part of the trial.

Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London—who Hehir did not allow the defendants to call as a witness—called the trial and verdict a “farce.”

“They mark a low point in British justice, and they were an assault on free speech,” McGuire in a statement said Thursday. “The judge’s characterization of climate breakdown as a matter of opinion and belief is completely nonsensical and demonstrates extraordinary ignorance. Similarly to suggest that the climate emergency is irrelevant in relation to whether the defendants had a reasonable case for action is crass stupidity.”

The verdict and sentencing also come amid an increasing crackdown on climate protest, both globally and in the U.K. The previous longest known civil disobedience sentences in the country were also for Just Stop Oil activists.

“The U.K. is a nightmare for climate activists from this point of view, in the sense that the sentences imposed in other countries are neither that harsh, nor that widespread,” Forst said July 12.

Greenpeace U.K.’s program director Amy Cameron said on Thursday: “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. 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.”

Forst also called on the new government to reverse course.

“Given the gravity of the situation, I urge the new United Kingdom government, with absolute urgency and without undo delay, to take all necessary steps to ensure that Mr. Shaw’s sentence is reduced in line with the United Kingdom’s obligations under the Aarhus Convention,” Forst wrote on Thursday.

Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingUK Climate Campaigners Get ‘Utterly Disproportionate’ Sentences