Silencing Voices: Europe’s Crackdown on Environmental Dissent

Christopher Ketcham

A British court last month issued extraordinarily harsh prison sentences to five climate activists convicted of helping to plan a series of road blockades in London. One of the activists, Roger Hallam, 58, a co-founder of the direct action groups Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, got five years. The others were each sentenced to four years.

Hallam’s crime wasn’t that he participated in the protest, which snarled London’s major beltway, the M25, during four days in November 2022. He merely gave a 20-minute talk on Zoom, a few days before the event, to explain the tactics of civil disobedience and emphasise its value as society’s failure to curb carbon emissions is increasing the chance of catastrophe within our lifetimes. He also stated during the Zoom call that he thought the action should go forward.

This is only the latest example of a wave of repressive government measures against climate protesters across Europe. The crackdown has come in response to a rise in demonstrations and disruptive tactics such as blocking roads and access to airports, defacing art in museums and interrupting sporting events.

Reflecting growing public frustration with such tactics, Rishi Sunak, the former British prime minister, endorsed this tough approach last year after two climate protesters were sentenced to prison terms of three years and two years and seven months for creating a public nuisance by climbing Queen Elizabeth II bridge in Kent. Forty hours of traffic gridlock followed after authorities closed the crossing.

“Those who break the law should feel the full force of it,” Sunak asserted, writing on X. “It’s entirely right that selfish protesters intent on causing misery to the hard-working majority face tough sentences. It’s what the public expects and it’s what we’ve delivered.”

But Michel Forst, the United Nations special rapporteur on environmental defenders, sees this crackdown as “a major threat to democracy and human rights,” as he put it in a report in February.

The effort to crush environmental dissent has come as some Europeans appear to have soured on the clean energy transition. In March, farmers across Europe protested climate and environmental policies that they believe are squeezing them financially. While Europeans generally think climate change is a serious issue, in recent European Parliament elections, Green parties lost one-third of their seats. Richard Youngs, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, noted in February that protests and campaigns have also raised concerns “against wind farms, low-emission traffic zones, requirements for households to change gas heaters, cuts in fuel subsidies, and other issues.”

Tolerance for environmental protesters appears to have waned. But the outrageous sentencings of the Whole Truth Five, as Hallam and his fellow defendants have come to be known, is yet another turn toward authoritarianism in the nation that gave the world the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, and a bill of rights.

Across much of Western Europe, extreme measures have been used against demonstrators, Forst told me in an interview. As he detailed in his report, legislation is “increasingly being used to stifle environmental protest” with “new offences, harsher sentences and bans on particular forms of protest.”

The Italian Parliament has heavily increased fines to punish protest. In Britain, Parliament has authorised police to crack down on protests if they become too loud. Several cities in Germany have prohibited protesters from sitting down in roads. In the German state of Bavaria, activists were detained for several weeks, without any charges, to prevent them from protesting. An environmental group in France was banned, albeit briefly, for what the government said was provoking violence.

Counterterrorism laws have been used to place activists under surveillance, according to Forst’s report. Their homes have been raided, phones and computers seized, and some activists have been arrested pre-emptively for saying that they were planning a protest. The police have used water cannons, pepper spray, tear gas and flash grenades to disperse protesters. Once in custody, protesters say, they have been strip searched, verbally and physically abused and held for days without charge. Journalists covering the protests have been rounded up as well.

Forst, whose position was created by the U.N. in 2021 after growing reports of state persecution of environmental activists, sat in on the trial of Hallam and his co-defendants. Prosecutors charged that they were part of a “conspiracy to commit a public nuisance.” Under a 2022 law, British courts can issue sentences of up to 10 years in prison to defendants convicted of “nuisances” such as peaceful marches.

After one of the sentencings, Forst said in a statement, “Today marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom.” As he told me, “Five years for taking part in a Zoom meeting is appalling.”

In his report to the United Nations, Forst said that the governments of Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, among others, had created “a climate of fear and intimidation for environmental defenders.” He said public figures of all sorts — politicians, lawmakers, commentators — have described environmental movements using words such as “extremists,” “eco-terrorists” and “the green Taliban.”

Forst went on to argue that the media “spreads and reinforces the idea that environmental protests are illegitimate, illegal and even violent,” which has catalyzed an atmosphere of cruel indifference where inconvenienced drivers blocked by demonstrators (in Germany, for example) have felt free to drag them by the hair, punch and kick them, and even run them over.

“The climate crisis poses a well-documented and terrifying threat to life, to humanity, to our planet,” Forst told an online news outlet last month, arguing that Britain “may end up filling up its prisons with the very people who realise that and try to change this deadly path.”

The case of the Whole Truth Five, so emblematic of the crackdown on environmental protests across Europe, sends a dismal message globally. Environmental activists are being murdered at a rate of one every other day as of 2022, according to one nonprofit, for a total of at least 177 in 2022 and nearly 2,000 between 2012 and 2022. The killings occur primarily in countries in Latin America and Asia where mining and other extractive interests run amok and the rule of law is weak or failing. The world needs to hear their voices.

At Hallam’s trial, the judge barred him from telling the jury about the impacts of climate change, ruling it wasn’t relevant to the case. “Without the whole truth,” Hallam wrote on X, “it is not a fair trial.”

Last year was the warmest since global record-keeping began in 1850. The 10 warmest years have occurred in the past decade. At the same time, emissions of greenhouse gases have continued to rise, and the European Union remains among the world’s top emitters. Truth is what the world needs, even if it must be delivered by protesters on the streets and reiterated again and again from the ramparts. The European countries suppressing dissent are smothering the sense of urgency that might otherwise compel those nations to do their part to stop this looming calamity.