Five Just Stop Oil activists jailed for conspiring to organise protests that blocked the M25 are launching bids to appeal what are thought to be the longest sentences ever given for peaceful protest.
Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin agreed to cause disruption to traffic by having protesters climb onto gantries over the motorway for four successive days in November 2022.
Hallam, co-founder of environmental campaign groups Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment while the other four protesters were each jailed for four years.
The five activists were due to formally file their appeal bids on Tuesday morning, environmental campaign group Plan B Earth said.
The group, referred to as the Whole Truth Five by Just Stop Oil on social media, were convicted by a Southwark Crown Court jury of conspiracy intentionally to cause a public nuisance, contrary to section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and Section 1 of the Criminal Law Act 1977, on July 11.
Prosecutors previously told the court that the M25 protests, which saw 45 people climb up the gantries, led to an economic cost of at least £765,000, while the cost to the Metropolitan Police was more than £1.1 million.
They also claimed it caused more than 50,000 hours of vehicle delay, affecting more than 700,000 vehicles, and left the M25 “compromised” for more than 120 hours.
At their sentencing on July 18, Judge Christopher Hehir told the protesters: “The plain fact is that each of you some time ago has crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.
“You have appointed yourselves as sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change.”
More than 1,200 artists, athletes and academics later condemned the “injustice” of their sentences in a letter to Attorney General Richard Hermer KC.
Their jail terms exceeded those handed to fellow Just Stop Oil protesters Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker, who scaled the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge on the Dartford Crossing in October 2022.
The Court of Appeal was later told Trowland, who was given a three-year sentence, and Decker, who was jailed for two years and seven months, had then been handed the longest terms for a peaceful protest case in modern times.
A Just Stop Oil spokesperson said: “Direct action works. Following decades of denial, it was only after Extinction Rebellion’s blockades of London bridges in April 2019 that the British Parliament declared a climate emergency and introduced a net-zero target.
“It was only after Just Stop Oil’s disruption to the M25 that Keir Starmer committed to ending licences for new oil and gas.
“The Whole Truth Five, along with others, did the best thing they could, according to the evidence, to prevent catastrophic and irreversible harm to the public and life on earth.
“Judge Hehir’s imagined ‘deterrent effect’ is both cynical and naive: it assumes we don’t love our children, but we do.
“It assumes we have no care for the future of our country, but we do. It assumes we don’t want to live, but we do.”
