London
CNN
 — 

As right-wing rioters attacked communities with racist violence across parts of the UK last month, 22-year-old climate activist Cressie Gethin sat in a prison cell.

Her crime? Organizing a disruptive protest against new government-granted licenses to drill for oil — a planet-heating fossil fuel — in the North Sea.

In late July, a London court found Gethin and four other members of the Just Stop Oil activist group guilty of “conspiring intentionally to cause a public nuisance,” after recruiting protesters to climb structures along the M25 — a major ring road around London — bringing traffic to a standstill in parts over four days in November 2022.

Prosecutors alleged that the protests, organized over a Zoom call, disrupted more than 700,000 drivers, caused economic damage of over £760,000 ($980,000) and racked up £1 million ($1.3m) in policing costs.

Now Gethin and three others — Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw and Lucia Whittaker-De-Abreu, who planned the disruption on the call — are serving four-year jail terms, while Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam was given five years. All are appealing.

The sentences are believed to be the longest in the UK’s history for non-violent protest and were delivered under two new controversial laws that supercharged policing powers to crack down on disruptive protests, even when they are peaceful.

They place the act of planning a “public nuisance” event, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, on a similar footing as violent crimes like robbery, for which punishments range from community service to 12 years’ jail, or rape, which is four to 19 years.

The judge — who in court referred to the activists as “extremists” — justified the long jail terms because all five activists had previously been convicted of one or more offenses in relation to direct action protest. Each were on bail for another set of proceedings when the Zoom call took place. He also noted people missed important doctor’s visits and funerals because of the protest.

But activists like Gethin say their demonstrations are proportionate to the problem at hand — a rapidly warming world that threatens to transform life as we know it, through deadly extreme weather events and by pushing ecosystems to their brinks. They are now battling the bolstered powers of the police and courts to get their point across.

“A very harsh sentence like this doesn’t make sense morally or legally — but it does make sense politically,” Gethin told CNN in a handwritten letter from HMP Bronzefield, a women’s prison just south of London’s Heathrow Airport.

The laws have drawn criticism from the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michael Forst, who said not only do they criminalize peaceful protest, but they are being enforced in “punitive and repressive” ways.

Big Oil has poured money into think tanks and charities that have had an influence on climate and protest laws. At least two think tanks that have received funding from fossil fuel companies made campaign donations to the ministers overseeing the legislation. One — the right-wing Policy Exchange — drafted a report that essentially served as a blueprint for one of the laws.

Despite its plans to transition to a net-zero economy by 2050, the previous Conservative government issued hundreds of new permits to further explore the North Sea’s oil and gas reserves in 2023, against the recommendations of climate scientists and the International Energy Agency.

The recently elected center-left Labour government has pledged to stop new licenses — but the tough policing laws remain.

“It is a pretty clear message, isn’t it?” Gethin said. “’You’re demanding change that puts our power and profit at risk, so you must be stopped.’”

The laws were purpose-built to target protest groups like Just Stop Oil. The UK government explicitly pointed to disruption from the group’s predecessor, Extinction Rebellion (XR), in its rationale for formulating the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022.

The Public Order Act 2023 brought in new criminal offenses and higher fines for protesters, such as “locking-on” — where protesters cling to a place or object — and “disruptive slow marching,” usually used to block traffic.

From their inception, the policing laws — which have also been applied to anti-racism and gender-equality protests — have sparked concern among civil society groups of a creep in authoritarianism in British society. Amnesty International said they mark a “dark new era for protest rights,” and give police “license to close down almost any protest they wish.”

Jodie Beck, head of policy and campaigns at the British human rights organization Liberty, said the laws “underpin inflammatory political rhetoric around the climate movement and racial justice movement,” and “strike at the heart of how we protest.”

There have been more than 3,000 Just Stop Oil activist arrests since the group formed in 2022, according to the group. Most of those arrests have been for planning or carrying out direct actions, including slow marching. Other activists, who have defaced famous artworks and buildings, were arrested and charged with criminal damage and trespassing. Twenty-one are currently imprisoned.

The Home Office did not respond to CNN’s questions about whether the new Labour government will reevaluate the laws, but said: “We recognize the democratic right that people must be free to peacefully express their views, but they should do so within the bounds of the law.”

A think tank linked to ExxonMobil and the laws

The 2022 policing law was drafted soon after an influential right-wing think tank called Policy Exchange, which has in the past received funding from ExxonMobil, outlined XR’s protest tactics and called for the criminalization of the group, in a report that heavily influenced the new laws.

It’s unclear how much money ExxonMobil has donated to Policy Exchange over the years as charities in the UK are not required to make their funding public, but in 2017, the oil company gave $30,000 to the think tank’s US branch, according to an ExxonMobil document.

At the time, Policy Exchange was part of the Atlas Network, a US-based non-profit that supports 500 “free market” groups globally, many of which are connected to the fossil fuel industry and the proliferation of anti-protest legislation in other countries. ExxonMobil told CNN that they do not currently fund Policy Exchange or American Friends of Policy Exchange, but did not answer questions about past funding. Policy Exchange did not answer CNN’s request for comment.

While lobbying — and donating to lobby groups — is legal, lobbying itself is poorly regulated in the UK, and lacks transparency. British think tanks are not required to name their donors.

Questions have been raised over the government’s closeness to Policy Exchange.

In 2023, as the world marked its hottest year on record, Rishi Sunak — the former prime minister whose government passed the anti-protest laws — thanked Policy Exchange for their contribution to the legislation, calling Just Stop Oil’s activists “slow-walking eco-extremists.” Sunak himself once worked for Policy Exchange as the head of a research unit on race.

Sunak’s government ministers met with fossil fuel representatives once every working day on average last year, according to an analysis of Transparency International data by environmental and human rights watchdog Global Witness.

Even though the UK voted the Conservatives out by a landslide in the last election, the divisive language used by Sunak’s government against climate activists remains prominent in the country’s tabloid media, and even in its courts.

Gethin said there’s a misconception that activists don’t care how their demonstrations affect others.

“We are, in fact, in a constant state of moral tension, conflicted about disrupting other members of the public like ourselves, whilst being left with very few alternatives to keep the crisis on the table,” she said. “The sad truth is that visible, disruptive action is the main thing that keeps it on the political agenda.”

Protests by Just Stop Oil, she said, are “an attempt to stop the mass starvation and loss of life scientifically proven to be the consequence of new oil and gas extraction.”

And even if direct action tactics are sometimes unpopular with the public, history shows that they have been key to major victories in many movements, including the US Civil Rights and women’s suffrage movements.

The UK’s lengthy jail terms stand out globally, but the creeping clampdown on disruptive climate protest is also happening elsewhere.

A report published Tuesday by Climate Rights International criticized the double standards of a number of wealthy nations that promote democracy globally for using tough policing laws, arrests and jail terms against climate protesters at home, including the UK, US, Germany, France and Australia.

In the US, at least 21 states have responded to climate activism by rolling out so-called critical infrastructure laws that criminalize protests near oil and gas pipelines, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law.

Those laws have proliferated since the Standing Rock Protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. While they vary from state to state, many share language written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing lobbying group that has received funding from fossil fuel companies, including Chevron and Energy Transfer — the company responsible for the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

ExxonMobil severed ties with ALEC in 2018, but had given more than $1.7 million to the group between 1998 and 2015, according to Exxon’s publicly available disclosures published by the Center for Media and Democracy. Chevron and Energy Transfer have not replied to CNN’s request for comment.

For Gethin, these links are no surprise.

“Unfortunately, if we expected resistance to the government and their fossil fuel backers to be met with a soft response, we were always kidding ourselves,” she said.

Even more concerning to campaigners is how the activists’ trials have played out.

The judge in the Just Stop Oil trial banned using the climate emergency as an admissible defense — meaning jurors were not allowed to take the defendants’ “political and philosophical” motivations into consideration when deliberating.

“Over and over again, he referred to our actions as ‘expressions of opinion and belief’ and our attempts to give evidence about the climate crisis (the only reason the actions happened) he called, ‘political grandstanding,’” Gethin said, speaking of the judge.

The UN’s Forst, who attended the proceedings, said the situation the activists were facing “signals that fundamental pillars of a democratic society are right now in grave peril in the United Kingdom.”

The Just Stop Oil case amplifies the near erasure of legal defenses available to protesters who take part in disruptive demonstrations.

In a separate case in March, a London court ruled that environmental activists accused of criminal damage could not rely on their political or philosophical beliefs as a “reasonable excuse.”

Tim Crosland, a former government lawyer and director of the legal charity Plan B, said the case sets a worrying precedent. Juries are often willing to acquit environmental activists if the reason for their actions is allowed as evidence, he said.

In 160 environmental protest trials from 2019 to March 2024, Plan B found most verdicts resulted in not guilty verdicts or hung juries.

In May, an independent government review on political violence and disruption recommended the judiciary examine the “potential issue” of juries acquitting disruptive protesters from progressive causes, including climate change and anti-racism.

The same report compared Just Stop Oil to “terror groups” and recommended their actions be banned.

The report’s author — Lord Walney, whose name is John Woodcock — serves in the UK’s upper chamber of parliament but is also a paid advisor to lobbying groups that represent fossil fuel companies, as well as arms manufacturers. In his report, he also recommended a ban on the group Palestine Action, which stands against weapons sales to Israel.

Woodcock has not responded to CNN’s request for comment, but at the time he told British media he had “consistently applied an objective standard and sought a wide range of perspectives.”

Meanwhile, people who rioted across England and Northern Ireland earlier this month were sentenced to two years on average for their participation in the violence. One man received a 3-year, 3-month sentence for throwing bricks and a trash can at police, less than Gethin and her peers.

Beck said that the law had led to uneven policing.

“You’re essentially creating a toxic mix there where the police will essentially intervene in some protests in a particular way and others in a completely different way,” Beck said.

Back at Bronzefield prison, Gethin’s life at just 22 has become devoid of agency and choice. But she’s not feeling sorry for herself, saying that she has enough to eat and can see trees outside her window.

Now, she is looking to the future — no matter how dystopian it feels.

“The terrifying outlook of ecological and social upheaval in the coming decades makes a fantasy out of any material aspirations and dreams I might otherwise have had,” she said. “But being a good person standing up for what is right — that is something I can work for, whatever the future brings.”