FIVE Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists who were given record jail time after attending a Zoom call formally launched an appeal against the sentences, legal charity Plan B Earth announced today.

Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were imprisoned for co-ordinating a peaceful action on the M25 over Zoom in November 2022. 

The action aimed to press the government to halt new oil and gas licences, something that has since been implemented by Labour since it took office.

They were convicted of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” under the Tories’ draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act.

Mr Hallam, co-founder of JSO, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment — the longest for a peaceful action in Britain — while the four others were each jailed last month for four years.

So far, those convicted for their part in racist riots over the last weeks have been sentenced to between two months and three years in prison. 

Lawyers for the JSO activists argue that the sentences were manifestly excessive and that the judge failed to take account of the legal obligation under Article 3(8) of the Aarhus Convention not to penalise, persecute or harass “environmental defenders.”

They say that he also refused to take into consideration the overwhelming threat to human life from greenhouse gas emissions.

During the trial, Judge Christopherd Hehir banned information about climate breakdown from being entered into evidence, dismissing them as “political opinion and belief.”

Global citizens’ movement Avaaz launched a national petition to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, which has already gathered more than 35,000 signatures, calling on the government to repeal the Tories’ repressive anti-protest laws and to hold corporate polluters to account.

A spokesperson for Just Stop Oil said: “Direct action works.

“Following decades of denial, it was only after Extinction Rebellion’s blockades of London bridges in April 2019 that the British Parliament declared a climate emergency and introduced a net-zero target.

“It was only after Just Stop Oil’s disruption to the M25 that Keir Starmer committed to ending licences for new oil and gas.

“Judge Hehir’s imagined ‘deterrent effect’ is both cynical and naive: it assumes we don’t love our children, but we do.

“It assumes we have no care for the future of our country, but we do. It assumes we don’t want to live, but we do.”