Credit: Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment – believed to be the longest sentence ever handed down for a non-violent protest in British legal history – while activists Daniel Shaw, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Louise Lancaster and Cressida Gethin were jailed for four years.

The five were convicted last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 in relation to the activist group’s disruption of the M25 motorway in November 2022.

The charges were brought after a journalist for The Sun infiltrated a Zoom meeting hosted by JSO and made recordings which the newspaper shared with police.

During the trial, the defendants attempted to avail of the defence of “reasonable excuse” by raising the impact of climate change, which the trial judge ruled was “irrelevant and inadmissible”.

The sentences have been condemned as “draconian” by Amnesty International as well as by Michel Forst, the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders.

Tom Southerden, Amnesty UK’s law and human rights adviser, said: “These lengthy jail sentences for people seeking climate justice should increase the alarm over the ongoing crackdown against peaceful protest in this country, which violates all our human rights.

“With our overcrowded prison system already described as a ‘ticking time bomb’ by the new lord chancellor, these jail terms are all the more indefensible.

“Today’s draconian sentences and the manner in which the trial was conducted show that the hardline anti-protest approach adopted by the previous government is being emulated by the courts.

“People should never be punished more harshly for engaging in protest than they would for an equivalent non-protest offence.

“We vehemently opposed the sections of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act that were used in this case, and we repeat our calls on the new government to repeal them.

“The government must protect all of our rights to protest, which are fundamental to a democratic society.”

Mr Forst, in a statement specifically concerning Shaw, said the ruling “means that, in the United Kingdom, participation in a Zoom call that discusses peaceful protest… exposes the participants of the call to the risk of a lengthy prison sentence”.

“How a sentence of this magnitude can be either reasonable, proportional or serve a legitimate public purpose is beyond comprehension,” he added.