The Politics of Dissent: Policing Environmental Activism and the Criminalisation of Environmental Protest

• In Event: The Criminalisation of Environmental Activism

Abstract

This paper explores recent criminalisation of environmental protest explicit in attempts to stifle dissent via public order policing legislation in the UK and in wider policy ideological battles on environmental protest.
Freedom of expression and freedom of assembly are protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) with European states broadly adopting laws allowing police/security service interferences with these rights only for certain specified purposes, only where necessary and requiring proportionality. Yet far from adopting an approach of the minimum interference necessary, in the UK new police powers specifically designed to crack down on environmental activism are being introduced while the attorney general is also attempting to remove the so-called ‘consent’ defence available under the Criminal Damage Act 1971. This defence, relating to criminal damage only, allows a defendant to argue they had an honest belief that the owner of the property damaged would have consented if they had known the reasons why the action had been taken. This defence is used by climate protesters and has been the subject of an appeal by the AG in the recent case of defendant ‘C’, after a string of acquittals by juries of defendants for acts of criminal damage involving non-violent graffiti/paint damage to buildings. Elsewhere in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK (again), the policy response to climate protests has been mass arrests, the passing of draconian new laws, imposition of severe sentences for non-violent protests and the labelling of environmental activists as saboteurs or eco-terrorists.
This paper argues that the response to environmental activism is ideologically driven and arguably represents a disproportionate response to environmental protests. Through analysis of police action and legislative change it contends that European interferences with environmental protest risk being non-compliant with the ECHR and represent an attempt to criminalise environmental protest.

Author

• Angus Nurse, Anglia Ruskin University