'A nightmare for climate activists' UN's rapporteur left shocked by Just Stop Oil trial

A s part of his role as UN special rapporteur for environmental defenders, Michel Forst has viewed proceedings against climate activists at courts across Europe.

- Damien Gayle

But he may not have seen anything like the events that have unfolded at Southwark crown court over the past two-and-ahalf weeks, where five Just Stop Oil activists were convicted on Thursday of conspiring to cause gridlock on the M25 in 2022.

On the days Forst visited, he witnessed three of the five defendants being arrested in court and dragged to the cells, protesters outside attempting to warn jurors they were not hearing the full case and a judge desperately trying to maintain control over his courtroom.

Judge Christopher Hehir had ruled that information about climate breakdown could not be entered into evidence and could only be referred to by defendants briefly as the "political and philosophical beliefs" that motivated them - which he would tell the jury were in any case irrelevant to their deliberations.

But the defendants had other plans. They sought to turn Hehir's court into a "site of civil resistance", causing as much disruption as necessary to ensure that if jurors could not see their evidence on climate breakdown, then they could at least be in no doubt it was being kept from them.

By the time the jury retired to consider a verdict, police had been called into court no fewer than seven times, four of the five defendants had been remanded to prison and 11 others were facing contempt of court proceedings for protests outside the court.

Roger Hallam, 57, Daniel Shaw, 38, Louise Lancaster, 58, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 34, and Cressida Gethin, 22, were standing trial on a charge of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, accused of being the "queen bees" behind a four-day series of climate protests on the M25 in November 2022.