2023 - The Year Governments Saw What Was Happening To The Climate & Decided Protestors Were The Problem

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After punitive sentences were handed down to climate activists, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human rights suggested in November that the sentences potentially breached international law. Indeed, earlier this month, the 57-year old climate activist Stephen Gingell was sentenced to six months in prison. His crime? Participating in a peaceful slow march in protest against new oil and gas licences – something that is now prohibited by the Public Order Act 2023. In the space of a month, at least 470 peaceful protesters were arrested with the aid of the raft of authoritarian measures driven through by Tory rule.

Like the climate emergency itself, the persecution of those fighting it is a global phenomenon. At the recent Cop28 summit in Dubai, protesters suffered restrictions on what they and their signs could say and where they could walk. The French government outlawed the climate activist group Earth Uprising under the dubious pretext that it fomented violence; this was rightly labelled by human rights activists as appearing “wholly disproportionate in violation of France’s obligations under international law”.

In Australia, new laws imposed steeper prison sentences and fines against climate protesters: all this, as Human Rights Watch notes, as the country faces “an onslaught of record-breaking temperatures, floods, and bushfires in recent years”. In New South Wales, meanwhile, punitive laws to crack down on climate protesters were last week ruled to be unconstitutional because they undermined “freedom of political communication”.

Meanwhile, climate activists suffer coordinated attempts to portray them as dangerous extremists. Take the Atlas Network, an influential global grouping of rightwing thinktanks: it has helped lead campaigns across the world to demonise climate activists as dangerous extremists. A report by the climate platform DeSmog argues that this has had real consequences: from the portrayal of the German climate movement Last Generation as de facto terrorists, which helped lay the foundation for police raids against its activists, to the British thinktank Policy Exchange, which is reportedly part of Atlas, publishing a report denouncing Extinction Rebellion as an “extremist organisation seeking the breakdown of liberal democracy and the rule of law”. Rishi Sunak later said that Policy Exchange’s work had helped the government in drafting its legislation to crack down on such protesters.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/22/2023-governments-climate-crisis-persecute-activists-silenced