Court of Appeal judgment on Just Stop Oil sentencing

Key points

• In January 2025, a hearing for a mass sentencing appeal took place at the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division. It involved 16 Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists, all of whom had received lengthy prison sentences – the longest being 5 years – for peaceful protest.
• The appeal was supported by Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK via a joint legal intervention.
• The Court of Appeal’s judgment handed down on 7 March 2025 reduced the sentences of 6 of the activists, for 5 of these on the basis that the original sentencing was “manifestly excessive”.
• The judgment provides some important and positive clarifications in the law, which benefit the environmental movement and those engaging in peaceful protest more generally. It makes clear that if someone is convicted of an offence resulting from peaceful protest, then the protections under the European Convention of Human Rights and their conscientious motivations must be factored into their sentencing. We hope that this will be of some assistance in curbing excessive sentencing in the future.
• However, it’s very concerning that in a democracy, we as a country are continuing to lock people up for sounding the alarm peacefully about the climate crisis. 

What’s the case about?

Background

In July 2024, 5 JSO climate activists were sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to up to 5 years’ imprisonment for joining a Zoom call to discuss plans for a peaceful protest on the M25. The purpose of the protest was to challenge the continued extraction of fossil fuels in the context of the climate crisis.

The 5 activists – Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Cressida Gethin and Roger Hallam (“Hallam and others”, also known as the “Whole Truth Five”) – had all been convicted of the new statutory offence of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. This offence was introduced through section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (PCSCA). 

The offence has a maximum sentence of 10 years. Someone can commit it if they intentionally or recklessly do something (or fail to do something) that:

• Creates a risk of or causes serious harm to the public, or
• Prevents the public from exercising their rights.

The 5 activists filed an appeal of their sentences at the Court of Appeal. Unusually, the court ultimately chose to list this as part of a wider joint hearing, involving the sentencing appeals of a total of 16 peaceful JSO protestors. All had been convicted of protest-related offences, and all had received lengthy custodial sentences. In total, their combined sentences came to 41 years. The hearing took place on 29 and 30 January 2025 at the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) in the Royal Courts of Justice, London.

The combined appeal involved the following activists (ages given are those at the time of the relevant protests/ incidents): 

• “Whole Truth Five” – Roger Hallam (aged 58; sentenced to 5 years), Cressida Gethin (aged 20; 4 years), Louise Lancaster (aged 57; 4 years), Daniel Shaw (aged 36; 4 years) and Lucia Whittaker De Abreu (aged 33; 4 years) received record-breaking prison sentences for planning non-violent disruption on the M25, to stop the granting of new oil and gas licences.
• “M25 Gantries” – George Simonson (aged 22; 2 years), Theresa Higginson (aged 24; 2 years), Paul Bell (aged 22; 22 months), Paul Sousek (aged 71; 20 months) and Gaie Delap (aged 75; 20 months) participated in the M25 protest by climbing onto gantries over the M25.
• “Navigator Tunnellers” – Larch Maxey (aged 50; 3 years), Chris Bennett (aged 31; 18 months), Samuel Johnson (aged 39; 18 months) and Joe Howlett (aged 32; 15 months) occupied tunnels dug under the road leading to the Navigator Oil Terminal in Thurrock, Essex.  
• “Sunflowers” – Phoebe Plummer (aged 21; 2 years) and Anna Holland (aged 20; 20 months) threw soup on the glass protecting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting.

Why we intervened in the case

Friends of the Earth doesn’t believe that peaceful protest about the climate emergency should result in jail time. Our prison system is already grossly overcrowded, without criminalising more people who are desperately calling for action on the climate crisis. Friends of the Earth is committed to undertaking peaceful, lawful protest, and to upholding the right of people to express dissent by non-violent means. Lengthy prison sentences can have a chilling effect on protest generally, including lawful protest.

There aren’t many environmental NGOs with expertise in defending the right to protest in court. Friends of the Earth is one of them. For years, we’ve been involved in legal challenges in both the civil and criminal courts, often in collaboration with community groups and sector allies. Together, we’ve won victories that protect fundamental freedoms.

We believed that these lengthy JSO sentences were draconian and unlawful. So, we chose to intervene in the appeal alongside Greenpeace UK, working together to maximise the impact of our submissions and seeking to bring about a positive change in the law.

Both organisations had opposed aspects of the PCSCA before it became law. Friends of the Earth was part of the Police Bill Alliance (also comprising Liberty, The Quakers, Bond and Friends, Families and Travellers), which won the Sheila McKechnie Award in 2023 for Best Coalition or Collaboration. The Foundation recognised that without the Police Bill Alliance, the PCSCA would have been even worse. Now that the legislation is in force, Friends of the Earth is determined to try to curtail the negative impacts it has on peaceful protest as much as we can.

Why’s protest relevant to our work?

Protest has a long history, in this country and beyond, of achieving positive change. The women’s suffrage movement and the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa are famous examples. More recently, the moratorium on fracking in England was achieved thanks to communities’ sustained resistance to this industry. Find out more about the importance of protest.

As a grassroots campaigning organisation, we believe that peaceful protest is a cornerstone to a functioning democracy. It’s an essential mechanism (among others) to build pressure on politicians to take the action necessary to combat the climate and nature crises. As things stand, the UK isn’t sufficiently addressing either.

But the space for civic society to express dissent is narrowing in the UK. New legislation such as the PCSCA has created new protest-related offences with severe penalties, including the statutory offence of public nuisance for which the Whole Truth Five were prosecuted.

The global civil society alliance Civicus has downgraded the UK’s level of civic freedom from "narrowed" to "obstructed". This makes it the most restrictive of all Western European countries. For example, Ireland, Portugal and Norway are classified as "open," and France and Spain are both classified as "narrowed" (this was also the UK’s classification prior to 2022). Research published in December 2024 found that in Britain, environmental protesters are arrested at nearly 3 times the global average rate.

The JSO protestors in this appeal were all motivated by their concern about the climate crisis and the world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels. These concerns aren’t extreme or novel. The climate science is clear: we can’t afford to keep burning fossil fuels. We must turn to clean, renewable sources of energy, and high-income countries must lead the way.

The UN has repeatedly made clear that current planned levels of fossil fuel extraction globally are inconsistent with staying within the global heating temperature limit prescribed under international law via the Paris Agreement. The 2023 UN Production Gap Report concluded that, collectively, governments across the world plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C. Furthermore, the 2021 International Energy Agency report (which was commissioned by the previous UK government) stated that globally, no further fossil fuel extraction is needed for the transition to net zero. 

The UN Special Rapporteur’s view

We knew that we weren’t alone in viewing these lengthy sentences with serious concern. In fact, the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention, Michel Forst, described the sentencing as a “dark day for human rights”. Speaking to the Financial Times at the time of the January hearing, he said that: “Disproportionate sanctions for protests… have a significant adverse impact on the most fundamental freedoms.”

The UK maintains that it’s committed to compliance with the Aarhus Convention (an international environmental justice treaty), so the views of the independent UN-appointed expert on this should be taken very seriously.

Legal submissions

In November 2024, Lady Chief Justice Carr gave Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK permission to intervene via written submissions in the appeal brought by Hallam and others. Given their appeal was subsequently linked to sentencing appeals brought by 11 other JSO activists (see above), we sought to draft our written submissions so that they were applicable to the other protestors’ cases also.

Our submissions supported and supplemented some of the key arguments made by the appellants, and the matters relevant to sentencing a person convicted under section 78 of the PCSCA 2022:

• In relation to the interpretation of section 78 of the PCSCA, we referred to the underlying Law Commission Report of 2015, which recommended the adoption of a statutory offence of public nuisance to replace the common law offence (judge-made law developed over time). The report is clear that the offence has a wide remit and isn’t restricted to conduct involving protest. It can involve actions where the right to freedom of expression isn’t involved at all. In our view, that indicates a need for leniency in sentencing when those rights are engaged, bearing in mind the range of activities caught by the offence and the fact that the statutory maximum sentence is 10 years. We therefore argued that the existence of the new statutory offence didn’t justify an inflation of sentences for peaceful protest as compared with what had come before it via the previous common law offence.
• We argued that conscientious motivation (in this case, raising the alarm about the climate crisis) was relevant to the sentencing of peaceful protestors. We submitted that this point had long been established in UK domestic cases, eg the Court of Appeal’s judgment in Tabernacle [2009]. We argued that this crucial factor hadn’t been taken into account at all when Roger Hallam, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw and Lucia Whittaker De Abreu were sentenced.
• We submitted that the exercise of rights guaranteed by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights was relevant to sentencing. But the Trial Judge had made no mention of these rights in his sentencing remarks for Hallam and others and had stated: “I do not regard your status as non-violent direct action protestors as affording you any particular mitigation.”
• We argued that the disruption caused by a protest or its location doesn’t take it outside the protection of the European Convention on Human Rights. We referred to case law from the European Court of Human Rights such as Kudrevičius v Lithuania [2016] and Laurijsen v The Netherlands [2023], which emphasise the breadth of these rights and their importance to democracy.
• We argued that sentencing needs to be proportionate. In view of this, we cited examples such as Ekrem Can v Turkey [2022], where the European Court of Human Rights held that jail terms of 1 year and 8 months for a protest were disproportionate. We highlighted that this sentence was itself far lower than those handed to the JSO activists.
• In the context of environmental protest, we argued that the Aarhus Convention was relevant to the question of proportionality. We referenced the statements of Michel Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur, and his concerns regarding the draconian sentencing of the protestors.
• Friends of the Earth also argued specifically that sentences of the length imposed could have a wider chilling effect on peaceful, lawful protest. This point has since been made by the UN Special Rapporteur, who stated in January 2025 that the negative effects of such sentencing aren’t felt just by those “personally criminalised” for protesting, but also by all who’d like to participate in protest actions but who are then deterred for fear of punishment.

The judgment

• Six of the activists’ appeals succeeded. The Court of Appeal held that the sentences handed to those convicted of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance (Hallam and others) were all “manifestly excessive”. It reduced all of them as follows: Roger Hallam (sentenced to 5 years; reduced to 4 years), Cressida Gethin (4 years; reduced to 2.5 years), Louise Lancaster (4 years; reduced to 3 years), Daniel Shaw (4 years; reduced to 3 years) and Lucia Whittaker De Abreu (4 years; reduced to 2.5 years). In addition, Gaie Delap’s sentence was reduced from 20 months to 18 months on the basis that the Trial Judge hadn’t been provided with the full information about her bail conditions. Ms Delap had been convicted of public nuisance for her participation in the M25 protest.
• The judgment concludes that conscientious motivation is indeed relevant to sentencing: “The appellants’ conscientious motivation was a factor relevant to sentencing in each case. It would have been an error for the sentencing judge to conclude on the facts that it had no part whatsoever to play in the sentencing exercise” [paragraph 26]. However, in the cases of Roger Hallam, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw and Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, the court held that the Trial Judge “took no account at all of the appellants’ conscientious motivation. Whilst he was right that conscientious motivation is not a matter of mitigation, it is a factor which may reduce culpability” [paragraph 81]. The interveners’ submissions on the issue of conscientious motivation are referenced at paragraph 25 of the judgment.
• The court also held that the protestors’ message “constituted ‘political speech’, to which particular respect is afforded: it involved a call for a change in the law” [paragraph 28]. Importantly, the judgment makes clear that, even if a protest takes place in an area where the public doesn’t have lawful access or involves a trespass, that doesn’t remove the protest from the protection of Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court rejected the argument to the contrary made by the Crown Prosecution Service. This finding is likely to be significant for future protest defendants.
• The court held that the effect of Article 10 and 11 rights must be considered at the sentencing stage (ie after someone has been convicted), even if a decision was made that those rights don’t provide a defence to the offence itself. However, in Hallam and others, the Court of Appeal held that the Trial Judge didn’t consider the effect of these rights when sentencing them. The judgment references the interveners’ support for the appellants’ argument that the sentences imposed amounted to a disproportionate interference with their Article 10 and 11 rights [paragraph 31].
• Disappointingly, the Court of Appeal rejected the application of the Aarhus Convention to the sentencing process. It further held that “it would not have been appropriate for the sentencing judges to have had regard to the Aarhus Convention or the views of the UN Special Rapporteur. The Aarhus Convention is not incorporated into English law” [paragraph 49]. It further concluded that in any case, Article 3(8) – which concerns the protection of environmental defenders from penalisation – didn't apply to these protestors, in contrast to the view of the Special Rapporteur that it did. It also expressed reservation about whether sentencing comparisons for other offences would be relevant or of assistance to judges passing sentence in relation to section 78 of the PCSCA.
• The judgment rejected the Crown Prosecution Service’s argument that the protest by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland was violent. It concludes that the protest was “shocking” but non-violent. It didn’t, however, reduce their sentences as a result of this finding. 

Wider significance

The judgment contains some important and positive clarifications in the law, which will benefit the environmental movement and all movements peacefully speaking truth to power.

The court’s findings that Articles 10 and 11 as well as conscientious motivation must all be factored into sentencing improves the law for protestors convicted of protest-related offences going forwards. The emphasis on the scope and breadth of Articles 10 and 11 is also helpful. For example, there’s been an approach in the Crown Courts that someone convicted of a protest involving a trespass (for example, a protest that wasn’t on public land) isn’t entitled to any protection under the European Convention on Human Rights. This judgment from the Court of Appeal makes clear that this approach is wrong.

The need to take account of these factors will give greater scope to argue for leniency in sentencing for peaceful protest. We hope that it’ll go some way towards curbing excessive sentencing.

However, until recently, it was virtually unheard of for peaceful activism to result in jail time. Alarmingly, the picture has changed dramatically in the last few years. While the Court of Appeal’s judgment has reduced some of these activists’ sentences, people remain locked up for peacefully sounding the alarm about the climate crisis.

The court’s approach to the status of the Aarhus Convention and the position of a UN-appointed expert is disappointing. In our view, to conclude that the Special Rapporteur’s views aren’t relevant to sentencing, on the basis that the Aarhus Convention isn’t incorporated into English law, doesn’t stack up.

For example, large sections of the Aarhus Convention are in fact incorporated into our domestic law. Article 4 of the Convention concerns access to information and is given effect through the Environmental Information Regulations. And as recorded in the Supreme Court’s Finch judgment [paragraph 20] (see our briefing on the case), obligations under the Aarhus Convention have been “built into” the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive. This Directive is in turn transposed into our domestic law via regulations. Furthermore, Article 9 of the Aarhus Convention, which concerns access to justice, is (partially) incorporated via the civil procedure rules.

Taking a step back, it’s deeply concerning that peaceful protestors can and have received harsher penalties than those people who participated in the violent, racist and Islamophobic rioting in the summer of 2024. This reality highlights the continued lack of tolerance for freedom of expression in this country.

The appeal of these 16 JSO activists attracted significant support and solidarity, given widespread concern over their lengthy sentences. The great-granddaughter of renowned suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Helen Pankhurst, shared her support for the 16 activists ahead of the appeal hearing in January, stating that: “The suffragettes are looked up to because they fought tooth and nail and refused to be silenced and give up on their cause, the universal suffrage now taken for granted in all democracies. Environmental activists today stand in the same tradition.”

Hundreds of people gathered outside the court across both days of the hearing in a show of solidarity with the 16 protestors. They included TV presenter Chris Packham, actor Juliet Stevenson and campaign groups Defend Our Juries, Extinction Rebellion, Amnesty International, Liberty and Not1More, as well as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK.

Conclusion and next steps

The Court of Appeal’s judgment does constitute an improvement in the law for the sentencing of peaceful protestors. However, much more needs to be done to prevent draconian sentences in this area.

We’ll continue to call for the repeal of the regressive anti-protest legislation that was brought in by the previous government, which is resulting in lengthy jail sentences for peaceful protest.

Our court work in the area of civic freedoms is ongoing. Friends of the Earth has a live application at the European Court of Human Rights to challenge the use of anti-protest “persons unknown” injunctions. We’re currently waiting to hear if our case will be communicated to the UK government, meaning it’ll have to formally respond to it. More details are available in our briefing.

Further information

Read the Court of Appeal’s judgment. For information on the law relating to protest, see our guidance.

Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK were represented in this intervention by Alex Goodman KC of Landmark Chambers and Jessica Jones of Matrix Chambers. The legal team within Friends of the Earth was led by senior lawyer Katie de Kauwe, assisted by Phil Michaels Legal Scholars Gabby Antrum, Savannah Harper and Gabhan O'Tighearnaigh. The lead campaigner was Denis Fernando. Greenpeace’s in-house lawyer was Jack Robirosa. The organisations’ external solicitors were Alexandria Marcou, Manoj Rupasinghe and Nimansa Thalduwa of the criminal defence firm Lloyds PR Solicitors.

Friends of the Earth is grateful to Alex Goodman KC and Jessica Jones for their helpful advice note on the judgment, which has assisted with the drafting of this briefing.

For further information, please contact the Friends of the Earth Media team on 0207 566 1649 or email [email protected]