Comment on Five Just Stop Oil activists receive record sentences for planning to block M25
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 4 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Five supporters of the Just Stop Oil climate campaign who conspired to cause gridlock on London’s orbital motorway have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms.
Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were found guilty last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance for coordinating direct action protests on the M25 over four days in November 2022.
Supporters of the defendants expressed outrage at the sentences, which came after a two-week trial in which Judge Hehir denied them any of the defences in law for causing a public nuisance.
Hehir ruled that the jury should not take into account evidence about climate breakdown, which the defendants wanted to point to as the key motivation behind their actions, and which they said provided them with a reasonable excuse for them.
Michel Forst, the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, who had attended part of the trial, had criticised the severity of protest laws recently introduced under the former Conservative government.
“Facing several years of imprisonment for taking part in a Zoom call – this is something I have not seen anywhere else and it is shockingly disproportionate.”
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