LONDON (AP) — Five climate activists who planned a protest to cause gridlock and block traffic over four days on a major highway circling London were sentenced Thursday to as much as five years in prison.
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 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 Christopher Hehir added his voice to the long list of critics when he handed down the stiff sentences in 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 U.K. 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.
Prosecutors said 45 people shut down the highway over 120 hours, affecting 700,000 drivers. Policing cost 1.1 million pounds ($1.4 million) and the estimated economic cost was 765,000 pounds ($990,000). One police officer was knocked off his motorcycle and suffered concussion during a protest Nov. 9, 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.
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 offenses.