Court of appeal’s removal of ‘consent’ defence means defendants on trial for criminal damage can no longer use it
It took a matter of minutes in the court of appeal, where demonstrators were strangely absent, for the dial to shift once more on the rights of protest in England and Wales.
In the last year climate protesters successfully used this defence in crown court jury trials. Juries, having heard the evidence, acquitted nine people who targeted the London HQ of HSBC bank, several individuals who daubed paint on the headquarters of the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens, and individuals protesting for Palestine Action.
Climate protesters might point out that the scientific consensus globally on the climate crisis, and the urgency of the need to act, are neither beliefs nor philosophical views, but hard facts. But that held no truck in the court of appeal, where a narrow point of law was analysed in a day-long hearing by bewigged judges, in the absence of any context on the pressing nature of global heating.
It was an earlier intervention by Prentis’s predecessor as attorney general, Suella Braverman, which removed the right to protest under the European convention on human rights,after Conservative MPs were angered over the acquittal by a jury of four people for toppling a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.
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