Britain has apparently created a new category of political prisoner - not through secret courts or show trials, but through the entirely above-board method of handing out increasingly long jail sentences to people who, say, block a road to protest the planet catching fire or a foreign government's military operations.
A new report from Queen Mary University of London and the protest group Defend Our Juries claims that custodial sentences for acts of direct action or civil disobedience, once a rarity, have become both more frequent and more severe. The report, launching Tuesday, points to a surge in anti-protest legislation in England and Wales, expanded police powers, and civil law injunctions brought by corporations and public bodies - plus judges who have taken it upon themselves to remove legal defenses and hand down what the authors call “exceptionally long” sentences.
In what they describe as the first analysis of the jailing of “Britain’s new political prisoners,” researchers identified 286 cases involving climate and Palestine-solidarity activists who were sent to prison for protest, totaling 136 years of jail time. The average detention period in the 256 cases with available data was 28 weeks. One in three protesters was jailed for six months or more; one in five for over a year.
David Whyte, the report’s co-author and professor of climate justice at QMUL, said: “These are exceptional sentences that are being used to apply to protests which are themselves profoundly political. Very often those protesters are reflecting majority rather than a minority view.”
The report identifies remand detention - time spent in jail before trial - as “the first line of attack,” with the effect of chilling protest and civil disobedience. In 60% of cases, final sentences were actually more lenient than time already served awaiting trial. The researchers highlight the “Filton 24,” charged with offenses connected to a Palestine Action protest at a factory near Bristol run by Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems. The accused spent up to 18 months in jail - three times the standard pre-trial limit - before all but one were bailed after the first six defendants were cleared of aggravated burglary. Two of those six were later acquitted of criminal damage. Eighteen more defendants still face other charges.
Contempt of court, where there is no jury trial, accounted for 40% of imprisonment cases. Some contempt charges arise from courtroom conduct or breaching a judge’s order (8% of total cases), but 32% come from breaching civil injunctions obtained by private companies or public authorities to prevent protest. Whyte noted: “The real danger is that you criminalise people for breaching something which is essentially a civil injunction. So that doesn’t start as a criminal offence but it ends up with a criminal penalty and that’s very concerning because it means that private companies, effectively, are imposing injunctions which lead to large numbers of people going to jail.”
Indeed, 69 people were imprisoned - some for holding placards - after Warwickshire borough council obtained a High Court injunction in 2022 in response to Just Stop Oil’s direct action campaign at the Kingsbury oil terminal.
A judicial spokesperson offered the standard defense: “Judicial independence and impartiality are fundamental to the rule of law. … Judges make decisions based on the evidence and arguments presented to them and apply the law as it stands. … Judges and magistrates sentence according to the law set by parliament and the sentencing guidelines set by the independent Sentencing Council, as well as the facts of each case.”