How criminalisation is being used to silence climate activists across the world
As wildfires and extreme temperatures rage across the planet, sea temperature records tumble and polar glaciers disappear, the scale and speed of the climate crisis is impossible to ignore. Scientific experts are unanimous that there needs to be an urgent clampdown on fossil fuel production, a major boost in renewable energy and support for communities to rapidly move towards a fairer, healthier and sustainable lowcarbon future.
Many governments, however, seem to have different priorities. According to climate experts, senior figures at the UN and grassroots advocates contacted by the Guardian, some political leaders and law enforcement agencies around the world are instead launching a fierce crackdown on people trying to peacefully raise the alarm.
“These defenders are basically trying to save the planet, and in doing so save humanity,” said Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders. “These are people we should be protecting, but are seen by governments and corporations as a threat to be neutralised. In the end it’s about power and economics.”
Climate and environmental justice groups report a significant increase in draconian, and often arbitrary, charges for peaceful protesters as part of what they claim is a playbook of tactics to vilify, discredit, intimidate and silence activists.
The Guardian has also found striking similarities in the way governments from Canada and the US to Guatemala and Chile, from India and Tanzania to the UK, Europe and Australia, are cracking down on activists trying to protect the planet.
The legal contexts vary, but the charges – such as subversion, illicit association, terrorism and tax evasion – are often vague and time-consuming to disprove, while a growing number of countries, including the US and UK, have passed controversial anti-protest laws ostensibly intended to protect national security or so-called critical infrastructure such as fossil fuel pipelines.
The systematic criminalisation of environmental defenders is not new. Natural resources on Indigenous land have long been exploited, driving big profits for some but also fuelling violence and inequality.
Experts say the Marlin mine in Guatemala was one of the earliest documented cases of a transnational corporation – and its state allies – weaponising the legal system against environmental defenders. Since then, the Inter American Commission on Human Rights has repeatedly condemned what it describes as the alarming rise in the misuse of criminal justice systems against environmental, land and other human rights defenders across Latin America.
“Criminalising defenders encourages collective stigma and sends off an intimidating message,” the IACHR said last year.
According to Lawlor, this criminalisation of environmental protestors has since become a global phenomenon, and is now the most common tactic used to silence and discredit defenders.
“At its core it’s about maintaining the power structures in place. This is true regardless of whether it’s a dictatorship, democracy or a corrupt narco state, and regardless of the state’s professed commitment to human rights, protecting the environment and combating climate change,” she said.
“Smearing defenders as lawbreakers or anti-development distracts from the cause and changes the narrative … What’s clear is that states learn from each other.”
‘Really terrifying’
Climate activism is well and truly back. Paolo Gerbaudo, an academic at King’s College London who studies social movements, said that before the 2008 financial crash, the climate emergency felt like “the challenge of our time”. But it “largely slipped off the social and political agenda” as activists such as Occupy turned their attention to opposing austerity policies and pushing for global economic reforms.
As scientific warnings grew ever more dire during the 2010s, there was a deepening feeling that traditional environmental campaigning was failing, and that politicians were not delivering – with potentially catastrophic