Protests took place outside the Court Of Appeal during the first day of sentencing appeals for climate protesters .
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00:00Well, Friends of the Earth is here today. A lot of people are here today because there's
00:04a really important legal appeal taking place today and tomorrow in the Court of Appeal
00:10behind us. It's a sentencing appeal which could have really far-reaching implications
00:15for the right to protest generally in this country.
00:18Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK are both very concerned at the record-length jail
00:23sentences that people involved in peaceful protest have received, up to five years in
00:29fact, and we believe that excessive jail sentences like this are a threat to democracy, that
00:36they breach human rights legislation and therefore we have intervened to try to support these
00:42sentencing appeals.
00:43Well, I'm here to show solidarity with the 16 climate protesters that I believe have
00:47been given unduly dracolian sentences. I believe that we should retain a right to peaceful
00:55protest in this country. We have a long history of that, achieving some of the freedoms that
00:59we have today, going back to the suffragettes, looking at the repressive homosexual laws,
01:04dealing with racism. People have had to stand up for their beliefs and that's a tradition
01:09that we need to retain. I think that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill has become
01:15unduly strong and it's repressing that right to protest and what we've seen here is a group
01:21of people who weren't even allowed to tell the jury why they took the action they did.
01:27There's no justice in that and the fact that they were given sentences far longer than
01:31those that are handed out to violent offenders and sex offenders says something about the
01:36repression that we're suffering.
01:39Environmental campaign groups Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK have backed the appeal
01:46currently taking place. Five of those involved in the appeals were jailed in July last year
01:53for disrupting traffic after climbing onto gantries over the M25 during a five day period
01:59in November of 2022. They were convicted of conspiracy to intentionally cause a public
02:07nuisance, a law which was introduced in 2022 which outlaws direct action that causes serious
02:14harm to a section of the public. During their trial the prosecution argued the protest had
02:21led to 50,000 hours of vehicle delays, an economic impact of at least £765,000 and
02:28a cost to the Metropolitan Police of more than £1.1 million.
02:33So these people have been exercising rights under the European Convention of Human Rights
02:38and rights under our own common law to protest peacefully and in this country there is a
02:44very long and proud tradition of civil disobedience on conscientious grounds and the courts in
02:51this country have traditionally taken a lenient approach to sentencing.