JUST STOP OIL (JSO) vowed to press on with civil resistance today after five of its activists were handed record jail sentences for nothing more than attending a Zoom call.
Judge Christopher Hehir set a disturbing precedent on Thursday after he jailed the activists for a total of 21 years at Southwark Crown Court.
They were convicted of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” for co-ordinating a peaceful action on the M25 that aimed to press the government to halt new oil and gas licences.
Judge Christopher Hehir jailed JSO co-founder Roger Hallam for five years.
Daniel Shaw ,38, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 34, Louise Lancaster, 58, and Cressida Gethin, 22, each received four-year sentences.
They are the harshest sentences handed out for peaceful protest in British history.
The activists had spoken on a Zoom call trying to recruit volunteers for the action, which led to gridlock on the motorway in November 2022.
A “reporter” from the Sun newspaper infiltrated the call, and passed recordings to police.
At the trial, Judge Hehir banned information about climate breakdown from being entered into evidence.
He ruled that climate issues were “irrelevant and inadmissible,” dismissing them as “political opinion and belief.”
When the defendants honoured their oaths and told the jury the whole truth about their actions, the judge had them repeatedly arrested and jailed throughout the trial.
Judge Hehir also ordered the arrests of 11 other activists who silently held signs outside the court saying: “Juries deserve to hear the whole truth.”
A Just Stop Oil spokesperson called it a “show trial,” but remained undeterred: “We will be taking action this summer, nothing's going to change with regards to that.
“Everybody needs to be focusing on this critical issue that faces us all, because we’ll regret it in years to come if we don’t.”
Policy Exchange, an oil industry-funded think tank, has been credited as helping shape the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act under which the protesters were sentenced.
Campaign group Climate Resistance stressed the urgent need for a legal system that has the “interests of people, not polluters, at its heart.”
A spokesperson called on the new Labour government “to take every step possible to secure the immediate release of our comrades and repeal these horrific anti-protest laws.”
UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders Michel Forst, who had attended part of the trial, said the verdict marks a dark day for “anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms” in Britain.
“How a sentence of this magnitude can be either reasonable, proportional or serve a legitimate public purpose is beyond comprehension,” he said.
A spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said: “Defendants are sworn to tell the whole truth.
“Jurors should be allowed to hear the truth and take that into account during their deliberations.
“This is more evidence that our system is broken and that the same powerful interests that have corrupted our politics have also corrupted our legal system.”
RMT president Alex Gordon wrote on X that while the activists received jail time for planning peaceful action, “no-one has been tried (let alone punished) for the 2017 Grenfell fire which killed 72.”
Judge Hehir has previously given suspended sentences to a police officer who had sex in a patrol car with a drunk woman he offered to take home, and a man who deliberately crashed a car into the gates of Downing Street who possessed indecent images of children.
