Climate activists ‘did what they did out of sacrifice’, appeal court told

The philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau were aired in the court of appeal on Wednesday as 16 climate activists sought to convince England’s most-senior judge to quash their long sentences for disruptive acts of civil disobedience.

The appellants, prosecuted in four separate trials last year, appeared at a mass appeal in London before a panel led by Lady Justice Carr, the Lady Chief Justice, where they argued judges defied decades of precedent by ignoring their conscientious motives.

They had received sentences ranging from 15 months to five years after taking part in various protests in 2022 as part of the Just Stop Oil climate campaign, which called for a moratorium on oil exploration in the North Sea.

Those sentences were “the highest of their kind in modern British history”, while others were “considerably longer than one would have expected”, said Danny Friedman KC, as he presented the appellants’ grounds for appeal.

“If these sentences on appeal are allowed to stand … they would constitute a paradigm shift in this area of criminal law,” he added.

Among the 16 was Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, whose five-year sentence for planning roadblock protests on the M25 is thought to be longest ever handed out in the UK for non-violent protest; Larch Maxey, sentenced to three years for tunnelling beneath the road leading to an Essex oil refinery; and Phoebe Plummer, imprisoned for two years for throwing tomato soup on the glass covering Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting at the National Gallery.

Each of them, and the co-defendants in their individual cases, were handed the long sentences after judges decided their crimes were so serious the usual leniency afforded acts of civil disobedience on conscientious grounds did not apply.

“They are the only known examples of punishment of peaceful protesters in which no reduction at all was made for such motivation,” said documents filed with the court by the applicants.

Central to their case was the claim that trial judges erred by failing to make such an allowance, in defiance of decades of common law as well as articles 10 and 11 of the European convention of human rights.

Such civil disobedience cases could not be assessed along the same lines as typical acts of criminality, the court was told, as they were acts “committed in obedience to conscience, at personal cost and potential sacrifice of liberty”.

In court filings, lawyers for the appellants described how the concept of civil disobedience originates with Thoreau, whose 1849 essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, was purportedly written in a single night the philosopher spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes because of his opposition to war and the slave trade.

Elaborating the concept with reference to Arendt, the influential political theorist who escaped the Nazis, lawyers quoted her as saying: “Civil disobedience arises when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer function and grievances will not be heard or acted upon.”

They added: “No crime is like the crime of civil disobedience, and the offender, even when the method is deemed by law to be disproportionate and otherwise open to moral criticism for its adverse effect on others, retains a ‘moral difference’ at the point of judicial penalty.”

“None of these applicants acted out of self-interest,” Friedman told the court. “What these applicants did by the way of collective non-violent protest, whether one likes it or not, was intended for the interest of the public, the planet and future generations.

“And so far as they acted in the knowledge they would be prosecuted … they did what they did out of sacrifice.”

Carr two years ago denied an appeal against sentence by two other Just Stop Oil protesters, Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker, whose jail terms of three years and two years and seven months respectively were at the time the longest ever for non-violent civil disobedience.

At the time she said their sentences, for stopping traffic on a motorway bridge for about 36 hours, “were not manifestly excessive” and met the “legitimate” aim of deterring others from similar offences.

But in court on Wednesday, Friedman pointed out the judge sentencing Trowland and Decker had cut their sentences after taking into account their motivation – an approach, he said, should also have been taken by the judges in the four cases in the appeal.

The Crown Prosecution Service is contesting the appeal. Jocelyn Ledward KC, for the crown, argued in court filings the sentences were “neither wrong in law nor manifestly excessive”.

The case continues.