Protesters behind 2022’s M25 shutdown have been handed four and five year prison sentences.
ADVERTISEMENTClimate protesters behind the 2022 shutdown of a major UK motorway have been sentenced to a collective 21 years in prison.
Four activists who planned the protest were sentenced to four years behind bars on Thursday while one was given a record five years.
The sentences were the harshest terms handed down for a peaceful protest in England, according to Just Stop Oil, the activist group that staged the demonstration.
The M25 protest caused gridlock and blocked traffic over four days on a major highway circling London.
The group’s disruptive tactics – from tossing tomato soup on Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ painting at the National Gallery to spraying orange paint on Stonehenge to interrupting the Wimbledon tennis tournament and other sporting events – have earned them a huge amount of attention while also creating many enemies and leading to jail time.
Judge says the activists ‘crossed the line from concerned campaigners to fanatics’
Judge Christopher Hehir added his voice to the list of critics when he handed down the stiff sentences in London’s Southwark Crown Court.
“The plain fact is that each of you some time ago has crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic,” Hehir told the group. “You have appointed yourselves as sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change.”
The five were convicted of conspiring to cause a public nuisance by plotting over a video call to have dozens of protesters climb over fences on the M25 motorway to draw attention to their cause at the time of getting the UK government to not approve new oil, gas or coal projects.
A journalist from The Sun newspaper, who pretended to be interested in joining the protest, provided recordings of the meeting to police.
What was the fallout of the M25 protests?
Prosecutors said 45 people shut down the highway over 120 hours, affecting 700,000 drivers. Policing cost £1.1 million pounds (€1.3 million) and the estimated economic cost was £765,000 pounds (€909,000).
One police officer was knocked off his motorcycle and suffered concussion during the protest on 9 November 2022, said prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward.
Roger Hallam, 58, a co-founder of Just Stop Oil and the group Extinction Rebellion, was sentenced to five years in prison. The judge called Hallam the “theoretician” and “ideas man” who was at the “highest level of the conspiracy”.
Daniel Shaw, 38, Louise Lancaster, 58, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35, and Cressida Gethin, 22, were given four-year terms.
At the trial, Judge Hehir ruled that climate issues were « irrelevant and inadmissible » dismissing them as « political opinion and belief ». The jury was directed to ignore any evidence about the climate crisis, and was prevented from considering whether it constituted a « reasonable excuse » under law.
‘An obscene perversion of justice’
Just Stop Oil called the prison terms “an obscene perversion of justice… for nothing more than attending a Zoom call.”
Before Thursday, the longest sentence for a peaceful protest had been a three-year term given to Morgan Trowland for scaling the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge over the River Thames to unfurl a Just Stop Oil banner that shut down traffic for 40 hours on the busy crossing east of London in October 2022.
Trowland’s appeal was refused last year by judges who noted that the prison term went well beyond those of people convicted of similar offences.
Another protester, Amy Pritchard, was sentenced in June to 10 months in prison for breaking a window belonging to the world’s largest fossil fuel funder, JP Morgan.
