HUNDREDS of people surrounded the Court of Appeal today as judges were urged to prevent street violence following the jailing of 16 Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists who had exercised their legal right to peaceful protest.

Environmentalists were handed the harshest sentences of their kind in modern British history last year after being refused protections under freedom of expression and assembly rights, the court heard.

The jailed activists had taken part in some of Britain’s highest profile climate protests, including climbing on gantries over the M25 and throwing soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery.

Naturalist Chris Packham joined the silent protest today, hours before judges retired to consider legal bids to quash the sentences.

Inside the courts, lawyers for the defence argued that three years after two 20-year-old women threw paint on a glass barrier protecting Sunflowers, the state is yet to present evidence to justify jailing them as violent criminals.

Danny Friedman KC urged the court to issue practical guidance to crown court judges about human rights cases, following failures across all four protest cases to take “conscientious motivation” into account. 

Having warned about a growing risk of an “uncoupling of conscience and violence” in Britain, he said the state has been the “singular antagonist” in denying defendants their human rights.

He described it as “the most significant interference arising out of expression and assembly that one can have,” arguing that the need for judges’ caution “escalates the more significant the interference is.”

Speaking to the Morning Star at the conclusion of the two-day hearing, Mr Packham said the Crown Prosecution Service’s position over Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer’s National Gallery protest was laughable.

He said that “it was difficult to hide my amusement” after the Crown referenced gasps from visitors in the gallery and calls for security when the soup was thrown.

“This was not a violent act – it was controversial, it damaged the frame – but ultimately it sucessfully drew attention to the single greatest issue confronting our species today,” he added.

He said the sentences passed have “become symbolic and totemic of a increasingly oppressive regime which is restricting our right to non-violent protest in a country which has an enormous history of that type of protest.”

Mr Packham said he had long held fears that state repression of peaceful protest would lead to violence.

“If peaceful protest is unable to communicate effectively to government, then as history illustrates that protest has the capacity to become violent and I do have a fear of that,” he said.

“In the future when people become desperate and things become increasingly difficult we need to make sure government listens to our voices.”

Representing the Crown, Jocelyn Ledward KC argued that the risk to activists’ health and safety – from climbing the M25 gantries or digging tunnels under roads around industrial estates in Thurrock, Essex, in August 2022 – justified limiting their human rights.

Arguing that trespass laws meant freedom of expression and assembly protections did not apply, she said: “Even if the act is expressive, in my submission, the judges were right to conclude that where trespass was involved or going on to land where the public are normally excluded for very good reason that that is capable in of itself of taking them outside the protection of the (European) convention (of human rights).”

She also argued that the actions taken were so “extreme” that any application of human rights law would be academic to whether sentences were “manifestly excessive,” saying they “may be interesting as an application of law but they don’t take the applicants further.”

Arguing that the court should issue practical guidance on when human rights laws apply in crown courts, Mr Freidman KC urged the Court of Appeal to correct and resentence on account of the breach of the defendants’ human rights.

Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, one of three judges who heard the appeal bids, said “clearly these are important issues” as she announced a written reserved judgment at a later date.

In a letter sent to Lady Carr, campaign group Defend Our Juries said the sit-down protest did not intend to “cause disruption” but sought “only to highlight, in a public and proportionate way, that what is occurring is the corruption of democracy and the rule of law.”