Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were found guilty last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance for coordinating direct action protests on the M25 over four days in November 2022.
Hallam received a five-year sentence on Thursday, while the other four were each sentenced to four years.
The sentences are thought to be the longest sentences ever given in the UK for non-violent protest, exceeding those given to the Just Stop Oil protesters Morgan Trowland (three years) and Marcus Decker (two years and seven months) for scaling the Dartford Crossing.
All five had spoken on a Zoom call trying to recruit potential volunteers for the actions, which involved activists climbing gantries at strategic points on the London orbital motorway.
Passing sentence on each of the defendants at Southwark crown court, the judge Christopher Hehir said: “The offending of all five of you is very serious indeed and lengthy custodial sentences must follow.”
Hehir ruled that the jury should not take into account evidence about climate breakdown, which the defendants wanted to point to as the key motivation behind their actions, and which they said provided them with a reasonable excuse for them.
Michel Forst, the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, who attended part of the trial, issued a statement at its conclusion.
“Today is a dark day for peaceful environmental protest” in the UK, he said. “This sentence should shock the conscience of any member of the public. It should also put all of us on high alert on the state of civic rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom.
“Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest that may, at one point or another, not align with the interests of the government of the day.”