Just Stop Oil sentences too harsh, Quakers and others say
Quakers have joined more than 1,100 lawyers, academics and celebrities in calling for an urgent meeting with the attorney general to discuss the “injustice" of lengthy sentences for peaceful protest.
Four Just Stop Oil activists were given four- and five-year sentences last week over the 2022 action which disrupted the M25 for four days.
The United Nations special rapporteur on environmental defenders said the sentences marked a dark day for anyone “concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms" in the UK.
Now an open letter to Attorney General Richard Hermer has criticized the sentencing as “one of the greatest injustices in a British court in modern history."
[QUOTE-START]
Harsh laws against peaceful protest limit our ability to speak truth to power.
- Paul Parker
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“With prisons at breaking point…how can these sentences be seen as anything other than insanity?" said the letter, signed by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser, among others.
The letter supported broadcaster Chris Packham and green energy industrialist Dale Vince's request for a meeting with the attorney general to discuss the “jailing of truth tellers and their silencing in court."
The government should address recent legislation which conflicts with international human rights law, and risks the right to peaceful protest, it said.
Last week a Number 10 spokesman said Prime Minister Keir Starmer believed judgements and sentencing was a matter for independent judges.
“It is not for politicians to interfere in such decisions," they said
Under the previous Conservative government, a parliamentary inquiry found that improper attacks on judges by ministers threaten the constitution.
But the government can change the increasingly draconian laws governing peaceful protest and hopes are growing that the new Home Secretary Yvette Cooper could abandon some of these laws.
Deeply concerned by the threat climate change poses to the whole of creation, some Quakers have taken nonviolent direct action as part of Just Stop Oil and other groups.
Recording Clerk Paul Parker, who signed the letter on behalf of Quakers in Britain, said: “We are called by our faith to stand up against injustice and for our world.
“Harsh laws against peaceful protest limit our ability to speak truth to power.
“We hold the Whole Truth Five and others who protest as a matter of conscience in the Light as they work for an equitable an ecological future for us all."