Silencing the messengers
November 23, 2024
Martha Lewis-Fairbrother looks at how environmental activists are being silenced, oppressed and murdered worldwide.
In August of this year, two anti-Barclays activists from Extinction Rebellion Scotland were convicted of malicious mischief, breach of the peace and wielding a bladed implement, and were each sentenced to 300 hours of community service following their arrest for breaking 13 windows of a Barclays building in Glasgow in 2022. Given their lack of previous convictions, fines were proposed instead of a prison sentence for the pair. However, the activists provided evidence as to why the fines could not be met and so were sanctioned with the maximum term of community service.
Any witness having attended a large part of the trial, as well as the sentencing, would be compelled to comment on many things about the proceedings. The defendants’ action was undertaken calmly, with safety precautions in place. The crux of the trial – and seemingly the judge’s biggest bugbear – was the cost of the damage – calculated at £60,000; notably, Barclays was the biggest funder of fossil fuels in Europe between 2016 and 2023. The ‘bladed implement’ used by the defendants was in fact a chisel, used with a hammer to break the shatterproof windows carefully. The action was one element in a wider campaign against Barclays carried out on 14 November 2022. In addition, the Rosebank oil field, which the activists wanted Barclays to stop funding, has been the subject of a successful legal challenge. It seems the prosecution of these activists is completely unjustified.
In January this year, UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders Michel Forst published a scathing statement reviewing the treatment of climate activists by the UK government and media. In it, he referenced the recent decision of Lady Chief Justice Dame Sue Carr prohibiting the use of evidence of climate change in trials. The ruling stated that, in England, the effects of climate change were to be categorised as an ‘opinion’ or ‘belief’, rather than fact. As a result of this change, as well as changes made to laws under which peaceful protesters are now being charged, alarming punishments have been imposed on UK climate defenders; perhaps the most egregious of these were the harsh prison sentences for activists from Just Stop Oil following the blocking of the M25 in July, the longest of which was five years.
In France, there have been repeated attempts by the government to disband groups related to climate activism, including Les Soulèvements de la Terre (the Earth Uprisings Collective), but thankfully these efforts have now been rejected as disproportionate by the French Council of State. In March 2023, this group, among other protestors, gathered to demonstrate against the building of mega-reservoirs to serve commercially predatory agribusiness interests. They were met by 3,000 police firing tear gas and flash grenades, and in the ensuing clash hundreds of protesters were injured, with two admitted to hospital in a coma.
Elsewhere in the world, climate activists – considered human rights defenders by the UN – face much worse attempts to curtail their exercise of civic freedoms.
In the US, campaigns to ‘Stop Cop City’ have seen draconian responses in the courts. Perhaps the most high-profile of these is the campaign in defence of Weelaunee Forest in Georgia, the prospective site for the development of a huge training facility for police officers. Protesters are concerned about the deforestation and pollution of the South River, which runs through the forest and is the fourth most endangered river in the US. In 2023, while taking part in a sit-in in the forest, Venezuelan activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was shot 57 times by police. This action was found by the courts to be ‘objectively reasonable’. Sixty-one other activists were arraigned on charges of domestic terrorism and racketeering (ie, any crimes involving extortion or fraud and that involve a racket) under laws introduced in Georgia to target mafia and organised crime.
In the Philippines, the government frequently uses ‘red-tagging’ to target climate activists. First implemented in 1969, this practice was designed to counter insurgent communist and Maoist groups (in particular those affiliated with the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines). It involves spreading misinformation on social media suggesting membership of or links with the NPA, which is illegal, thus providing grounds on which to arrest target subjects. Misinformation is followed by threats or physical surveillance, attacks, arrests, detention and, in some cases, extrajudicial killings.
Similarly, members of the Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (known as OFRANEH) face extensive harassment and threats from the government of Honduras, which is reckoned to be the deadliest country in the world for environmental activists.
Demonstrations against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) in Uganda have also been met with harsh government-backed action. If completed, EACOP will be the longest heated crude-oil pipeline in the world, connecting Ugandan oil fields with those along the Tanzanian coast. A huge part of the funding for the pipeline would come from China’s state-owned banks and insurance companies, and Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and state president, has expressed open support for the project. Student climate defenders in Uganda had planned to march to the Chinese embassy in Kampala to deliver a petition against the development of the pipeline, but 30 protestors were violently arrested and detained. Despite this brutality and intimidation, the protestors remain committed to stopping EACOP.
The bravery of those opposing these kinds of threats from authorities all over the world cannot be overstated and, considered in the context of the devastating effects of the triple planetary crisis of pollution and climate and ecological crisis, the personal danger climate defenders face is something that should scare us all.
Martha Lewis-Fairbrother
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