More than thirty people in the public gallery risked imprisonment for contempt of court at the High Court this morning. They stood up silently and revealed T-shirts spelling out “Corruption In Court“, while Lady Chief Justice Sue Carr read out the court’s judgement on four conjoined Appeals Against Sentence heard last month.
In a decision which further marks an increasingly undemocratic intolerance to peaceful protest, the court upheld nearly all the sentences given to the climate protesters who are known as the #Walney16.
The only real concessions were to the #WholeTruth5, found guilty of conspiring (in a Zoom call infiltrated by a right-wing press journalist) to halt traffic on the M25 in protest at government inaction on climate. Their sentences were slightly reduced (*see below), in order to avoid “undesirable sentencing inflation”. Also, one of the gantry protesters, Gaie Delap, who had extra days added to her sentence for being “at large” when government contractors, Serco, were unable to fit an electronic tag on her ‘small wrists’. The appeal judges reduced her 20 month sentence by two months. The remaining ten prison terms under review were all upheld.
Although the court upheld that Articles 10 and 11 should be engaged in protest cases, they said that Crown Court judges had been correct in ignoring the UK’s obligations under the Aarhus Treaty, and the grave concerns raised by UN Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, Michel Forst.
The four appeal cases included the Van Gogh ‘soup throwers’, Phoebe Holland and Anna Holland, who received 2 years and 20 months respectively, for throwing soup over the glass-protected ‘Sunflowers’ painting at the National Gallery in October 2022.
The other two cases appealed were five protesters who took part in M25 gantry Just Stop Oil protests, and four activists who dug tunnels under road to an Essex oil refinery as part of the JSO protests in April 2022.
The huge rise in custodial “deterrent” sentencing has occurred since the May 2024 report authored by disgraced MP Lord Walney, at a time when the Conservative government and right-wing news media were demonising climate protest movements. Lord Walney, a former Chair of Friends Of Israel, has close financial connections to fossil-fuel companies and arms manufacturers. A series of bizarre social media posts revealed his personal hatred for the Palestine Action network, describing them as Hamas’ Little Helpers, which undermined his professed ‘independence’. After a period of confusion over his standing, he was eventually sacked last month, but the effect of his supposedly independent report has been to corrupt the judicial system through this extraordinary change in the treatment of peaceful protest.
The UK’s drift towards intolerant authoritarianism has been cemented both by today’s decision, and by the progress of the new Crime and Policing Bill under Labour, which includes startling proposals to hand over the entire database of driving licence photographs to police, and to ban facial coverings from all protests.
Lawyer Raj Chada has been defending protest cases for more than 15 years, but in a recent speech, he spoke about how until the past 3 years, he had never seen a protester imprisoned.
Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell called today’s decision a “criminal injustice”, pointing out that peaceful climate protesters are getting much longer sentences than the violent Suffragettes did, or than many today are receiving “for serious homophobic, racist or sexual assaults”.
Phoebe Plummer sent a message which was read out outside the court today:
“Our democracy is being sold off to the highest bidder, our courts have been corrupted by the oil and arms industries, and are continuing to jail good people for telling the truth, for resisting genocide in Palestine and the continued extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal. This is justice bent to serve power instead of ordinary people.”
* Whole Truth Five sentence reductions:
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- Roger Hallam – 5yrs reduced to 4yrs
- Cressida Gethin – 4yrs reduced to 30 months
- Louise Lancaster – 4yrs reduced to 3yrs
- Daniel Shaw – 4yrs reduced to 3yrs
- Lucia Whittaker De Abreu – 4yrs reduced to 30 months
