Suffragette’s great-granddaughter attacks protest sentences ahead of appeal bids
More than a dozen climate protesters are due to seek to challenge the length of their sentences at a hearing on Wednesday.
The great-granddaughter of leading suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst has said sentences given to several climate protesters are “heavy-handed and disproportionate” ahead of the Court of Appeal hearing challenges against their jail terms.
Sixteen activists who received prison terms of between five years and 15 months for their involvement in four climate protests will bid to appeal against the length of their sentences at a joint hearing set to begin on Wednesday.
Environmental campaign groups Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK have been allowed to intervene in the case of five protesters, with FoE claiming the sentences were of “unprecedented length related to peaceful protest”.
The challenges are set to be heard at the Court of Appeal in London over two days.
Adding her support to the appeal bids, campaigner Helen Pankhurst said: “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. I have no doubt future generations around the world will thank them for their campaigns.
“The heavy-handed and disproportionate custodial sentences given in the UK to peaceful environmental activists speaking truth to power is worrying in the extreme.
“A repeal is the only just outcome here.”
FoE and Greenpeace UK will intervene in the appeal bids of five protesters, referred to by FoE as the “Whole Truth Five”, who were jailed in July last year for agreeing to disrupt traffic by having protesters climb on to gantries over the M25 for four successive days in November 2022.
Roger Hallam, co-founder of environmental campaign groups Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, was sentenced to five years in prison while Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin each received four-year jail terms.
FoE and Greenpeace UK said their submissions supporting the five would also “assist those involved in the other linked appeals”.
George Simonson, Theresa Higginson, Paul Bell, Gaie Delap and Paul Sousek were jailed for their involvement in protests on the M25, during which they climbed on to gantries over the motorway.
Simonson and Higginson were jailed for two years, Bell for 22 months, and Delap and Sousek for 20 months last August.
Larch Maxey, Chris Bennett, Samuel Johnson and Joe Howlett all received prison terms of between three years and 15 months, after occupying tunnels dug under the road leading to the Navigator Oil Terminal in Thurrock, Essex.
Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed in September 2024 after almost “destroying” Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers by throwing soup on its protective glass at London’s National Gallery.
Plummer was sentenced to two years behind bars and Holland 20 months.
FoE said that its lawyers would argue that the sentences were “excessive” and breached human rights legislation, claiming they posed a “serious threat to our democracy”.
Katie de Kauwe, senior lawyer at FoE, said: “Instead of further burdening our overcrowded prison system by criminalising those trying to push the climate and nature emergencies up the political agenda out of sheer desperation, the Government should be accelerating efforts to deliver fair and meaningful action on the environment.
“Growing discontent is purely a symptom of the frustration felt at the lack of leadership and progress on one of the greatest challenges of our time.
“Silencing those striving for a better world will not make these escalating crises disappear – doing so only serves to stifle our democracy.”
Areeba Hamid, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: “These long sentences for peaceful protest make it difficult to see modern Britain as the kind of mature, tolerant culture our parents and grandparents enjoyed.
“Hopefully cooler heads will realise that we could be throwing away something of great value to us all for the sake of avenging an inconvenience.”
