LONDON (Reuters) - Environmental activists accused of criminal damage cannot rely on their political or philosophical beliefs as a defence, London’s Court of Appeal ruled on Monday, raising the prospect of more protesters being convicted for direct action.
Various groups have targeted companies and political parties in Britain, causing damage to property in order to raise awareness of climate-change issues.
The rise in the use of direct action has prompted a wider crackdown on protest movements in Britain and across Europe, particularly in relation to environmental groups.
Monday’s ruling effectively prevents environmental protesters from relying on their beliefs about the dangers of climate change as a defence to criminal damage.
No it’s cool. Megacorps can rape and pillage the earth, fund climate denial, and fuck with economic balances like fair pricing. But god forbid people take a stance and fight back. Gotta back the businesses. Because in the end they’re the only ‘people’ who will remain after humans are dead.
Yes this is unfortunately the risk of direct action. Protests that aren’t inconvenient will rarely have an impact. And inconvenient protests are often illegal in some way. Seeing the state try to stop dissent by enforcing the laws is not a surprise and the protestors likely knew this could happen.
Instead this kind of coverage should make people angry and encourage more protests. It’ll be difficult to prosecute thousands for trespassing and other minor crimes and that’s when protesting really starts to have an affect.
Also, in civil rights movements the point is to be arrested for breaking an unjust law. Then your group publicizes it so people can see how unjust the law is.
The problem is, you need to break a law that is actually unjust. Laws against trespassing and vandalism aren’t really controversial, so being arrested for breaking them isn’t a shock to anyone.
Should anyone be allowed to go wherever and paint whatever slogans anywhere? If it’s legal, people you disagree with are going to do it too.
The problem is that they are protesting the lack of laws and regulation. So they can’t break laws to show they are unjust. They can take direct action against those that are most responsible for climate change, and people have been doing that. They are also frequently charged, penalized, fined, and imprisoned. They are bringing attention to a problem and hoping enough people notice.
If the courts are ineffective to combat polluters, and the state is ineffective to combat polluters, and the politicians are ineffective to combat polluters, it becomes the people’s job to combat polluters.
But what if we solve the problem by making it illegal for the people to combat polluters?
We blow shit up (by which I mean, of course, have a big balloon party)
Calling for violence is against the subreddit rules so I’m afraid I cannot answer this question.
You’re on Lemmy, but it’s probably against rules here too…
Sublemmy rules*
I’ve been 3 day banned and comment deleted for it here before so I won’t say it.
The wording of the article here, ‘can’t rely on beliefs’ is doing a lot of work, first it frames legitimate concerns about climate change as ‘beliefs’, and second of all it implies that people are somehow dodging criminal damage charges based on their subjective feelings, which isn’t what’s happening at all. Instead, the UK government is stripping away a layer of legal protection for protestors which was established in the Criminal Damage Act of 1971 (for more info google ‘the consent defence’).
The UK has been drifting into authoritarianism for a long time, but in the last few years, the repeated attacks on people’s right to protest have become far more transparent. There is a high-ranking UK judge called Silas Reid who became famous for forbidding mentions of climate change in his courtroom, and recently threatened a jury with prosecution if they acquit a group of climate protestors.
It’s sad to see newspapers spin this into such neutral language. This is a brazen assault on human rights.
And people buy into this crap!
“Why do you drive a car or use a phone if you’re fighting for the climate!?!?” We all want the tech jackass, we just don’t want to destroy the environment we live in. Is being clean and careful really that much to ask? According to the Government, it seems so.
I’m really glad that the most powerful governments in the world believe that property is more important than people and the planet. Great priorities, makes sense.
/s obviously
I mean, yeah, in a court of law you should probably have some kind of evidence for stuff instead of just believing in it.
There’s tons of evidence of fossil fuels causing climate change.
Definitely, but where is the evidence that excuses otherwise illegal acts done to protest this wrong?
This ruling is correct, though those activists should probably be pardoned or charges against them dropped. Protesting effectively often violates some statutes, this is why civil rights leaders were constantly in and out of jail - they didn’t commit murders, but they definitely violated restrictions on loitering and other minor offenses… and we celebrate them for having the courage to do so. Rosa Parks’ most famous moment was just flat out refusing to obey an unjust law.
These individuals will pay a price in the short term… but they’re right. They’re on the right side of history.
So use that in court.
Sure let me sue $10 trillion dollar oil companies. The legal system is totally mega fair and impartial.
The news story is precisely that the judge has decided that it doesn’t matter why the protesters are doing what they are doing - whether they have evidence or not. His wording was something like “that may or may not be occurring”.
According to the judge, only the fact that they damaged property is relevant. That they did it to demand action against a significant threat to humanity, is not.
I don’t think you understand the case. I think you’re just saying things out of complete ignorance. Which is fine it’s just a comment thread on a tiny website, but at some point, you should just go read up on the actual situation rather than continue to make statements out of ignorance, that doesn’t contribute to the conversation or benefit anyone.
Stop being so rational. We don’t like that here
