Friends witness against attempts to override juries
'The ruling was being sought to override juries who wish to acquit protestors.'
Quakers gathered at the Royal Courts of Justice in London last month to witness against a ruling seeking to override juries.
The ruling was being sought to override juries who wish to acquit protestors. On the application of Victoria Prentis, the attorney general, the Court of Appeal considered whether to remove the last remaining legal defence for many activists: the belief that the owners of property would have consented to the damage caused if they fully understood the circumstances. Tom Little KC argued that use of the defence under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 was wrong, and too broad an interpretation of the law. But Henry Blaxland KC told the appeal court judges that to stop a defendant presenting the defence ‘would be a slippery slope to the erosion of the constitutional right to trial by jury’.
The application follows cases where activists are being acquitted by juries on this ‘belief in consent’. In 2023, this included a group who sprayed the Treasury with fake blood, to draw attention to the scale of UK Export Finance’s investments in fossil fuels. Nine women were also acquitted on this defence after they broke windows at HSBC to shine a spotlight on HSBC’s £80 billion financing of fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement.
Defendants have also been banned from explaining their motivations in court, which many Quakers have been witnessing against. Michel Forst, the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, has called the situation ‘extremely concerning’. In a UN-commissioned report, he said: ‘It is very difficult to understand what could justify denying the jury the opportunity to hear the reason for the defendant’s action, and how a jury could reach a properly informed decision without hearing it, in particular at the time of environmental defenders’ peaceful but ever more urgent calls for the government to take pressing action for the climate.’
