SIX Just Stop Oil (JSO) supporters have been found not guilty of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance in relation to the 2022 actions that blocked the M25.

Tim Hughes, Daniel Juniper, Karen Matthews, James Skeet, Alexander Wilcox and Christopher White were acquitted on Wednesday after being tried by a 12-member jury in a four-week trial at Southwark Crown Court.

Two activists, Ian Bates and Abigail Percy-Ratcliffe, were found guilty and will be sentenced on May 9. 

JSO says there was no direct evidence of an agreement among the defendants to block the M25, so prosecution relied heavily on circumstantial evidence, using everyday items recovered during arrests.

This included the seizure of commonplace objects like an umbrella, a pair of trousers, party poppers, sanitiser wipes, duct tape, string, an Extinction Rebellion-branded vest, a sticker reading “The planet burns, Boris fiddles” and a screwdriver.

Speaking after the verdict, Mr Skeet said that the activists “had the resources of six police departments mobilised against us in a Kafkaesque case where mere proximity to a protest and possession of party poppers or the wrong type of trousers has been regarded as sufficient evidence to waste vast sums of public money.”