JAIL terms for Just Stop Oil (JSO) protesters suggest judges have misunderstood the Human Rights Act across three decades – and could prompt an “extraordinary jump” in sentencing, the Court of Appeal heard today.

Danny Friedman KC said he was surprised “it isn’t simple” that freedom of expression and freedom of assembly should be considered when sentencing defendants with “conscientious motivation.”

A failure to to do so for 16 activists across four protests, who were jailed for up to five years in 2024, suggests “a lack of clarity and comfortableness with sentencing in human rights cases,” he suggested.

The protests included climbing on gantries over the M25 and throwing soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

Mr Friedman said he appreciated that human rights cases do not often come up before criminal courts, but said the situation was a “clear error of law.” Allowing the sentences to stand would mark a “paradigm shift in this area of criminal law sentencing,” he warned.

All the protests involved “peaceful protest” and the activists “acted in the knowledge that they would be prosecuted.”

Before a crowded public gallery including famous naturalist Chris Packham and former Green MP Caroline Lucas, Mr Friedman said some sentences had been “the highest of their kind in modern British history.” Others were “considerably longer than one would have expected."

He said the protesters were – as Martin Luther King described – creating “a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

“What these applicants did by way of collective, non-violent protest, whether one likes it or not, was for the interests of the public, of the planet and of future generations,” the KC said.

“They did what they did out of sacrifice.”

He warned that not allowing the sentences to be appealed would lead to an “extraordinary jump in deterrent effect” for future civil disobedience and cause constitutional harm to Britain that would undo the post-Reformation “uncoupling of conscience and violence.”

Among the group is Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam, who was jailed for five years for agreeing to disrupt traffic by having protesters climb onto gantries over the M25 for four successive days.

The Crown Prosecution Service is opposing the appeal bids. The hearing continues tomorrow.