His Honour Judge Christopher Hehir has seen it all during a career that has taken in the trials of fraudsters, paedophiles, drug gangs, and, in proceedings that made news this year, two police officers from Derbyshire who’d enjoyed a threesome in their patrol car with an ‘extremely drunk’ woman.
Yet few cases, during his 35 years on the front line of our justice system, have created quite so much controversy — and, one might argue, chaos — as the one that culminated at around 3pm on Thursday in courtroom No.4 at Southwark Crown Court.
Sat in the dock was Roger Hallam, the 58-year-old founder of high-profile protest group Just Stop Oil.
Next to him were four of the organisation’s leading figures: Daniel Shaw, Lucia Whittaker de Abreu, Louise Lancaster and Cressida Gethin.
The group was being sentenced for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, having been found guilty of organising a climate change demonstration on the M25 over four successive days in November 2022.
Roger Hallam (pictured) was one of five Just Stop Oil protesters jailed for conspiring to organise protests that blocked the M25 motorway
From left to right: Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw and Roger Hallam. Hallam was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment while the remaining four defendants were each handed four years’ imprisonment
The economic cost of the stunt was more than £765,000, with a further £1.15million in policing across six counties – but the human cost of people missing important flights, funerals, exams and hospital appointments was also high
Police watch as traffic is held back as an activist from Just Stop Oil occupies a gantry over the M25 near Godstone in Surrey in November 2022
Like many a Just Stop Oil stunt, it had proven hugely disruptive, with police forced to close large sections of Britain’s busiest road, which orbits London.
Tailbacks spread across the South East for the thick end of a week.
People missed flights and funerals. School students were delayed en-route to vital mock exams.
A child with special needs had, the court heard, been unable to take medication which prevented them becoming highly volatile, while a victim of aggressive cancer missed a hospital appointment and was forced to wait two months for treatment.
In total, more than 700,000 vehicles were caught up in the carnage. A police officer dealing with disruption was knocked off his motorbike and concussed.
Hospitals missed food deliveries. The economic cost was more than £765,000, while police forces across six counties clocked up a further bill of almost £1,150,000.
That was the background. Now it was time for payback. To gasps from the public gallery, Judge Hehir announced that he was imposing record sentences on the eco-campaigners, totalling 21 years: five for Hallam and four for each of his accomplices.
Dubbing them ‘fanatics’ who ‘have appointed yourselves as the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound by neither the principles of democracy or the rule of law’, he wrapped up his remarks with the time-honoured words: ‘Send them down!’
There has followed what can loosely be described as a major hoo-ha, with Hehir attracting remarkably virulent criticism from Leftward extremes of the political spectrum for the supposedly draconian tariffs.
TV presenters Chris Packham and Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall (right) post with Dale Vince and Baroness Jenny Jones at a protest outside Southwark Crown Court
As the group was led away, supporters sobbed and shouted such slogans as: ‘You are on the right side of history!’
Around a hundred Just Stop Oil followers then staged a demonstration outside court, declaring the jail terms ‘horrifying and brutal. The supposedly impartial BBC presenters Chris Packham and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall addressed the crowd, with Packham feeling entitled to demand a video-recorded meeting with Sir Keir Starmer’s Attorney General Richard Hermer to ‘address this grotesque miscarriage of justice’.
Green Party Peer Jenny Jones, who regarded the sentences as ‘astonishingly severe’, took to X (formerly Twitter) to brand Judge Hehir, among other things, ‘outstandingly ignorant’.
Writing for The Guardian (of course!) one commentator accused Hehir of handing down ‘sentences of the kind you might expect in Russia or Egypt’.
In the sewer that is social media, the judge was variously branded a ‘fascist tw*t,’ ‘crazed fanatic’ and ‘despicable w***er’ who ‘should be fired’.
Dale Vince, Sir Keir Starmer’s favourite green energy tycoon, who has donated £1.4 million to Labour, was then handed the microphone.
He attacked ‘the most shocking of sentences from a truly shocking judge’.
These and other takes represent, as the old saying goes, one way of looking at things. But they certainly aren’t the only way.
Around a hundred Just Stop Oil followers staged a demonstration outside court, declaring the jail terms ‘horrifying and brutal
Supporters of the jailed protesters gathered outside the court building to have their say following the handing down of hefty prison terms
A woman covered her hands in orange paint and demonstrated outside the court building
For lost in this outpouring of bile (which, ironically, came largely from a demographic who, during the Brexit ‘wars’, were vigorously insisting that Britain’s judiciary ought never to be criticised) were a few hard truths.
Take them into account and it’s perfectly possible to argue that Hallam and his associates actually got off rather lightly.
The crime of which they were convicted, after all, carries a maximum sentence of ten years.
Yet despite being persistent offenders, with 22 prior convictions for 31 offences between them, they’ll serve just a fraction of that period, enjoying automatic release half (or perhaps 40 per cent) of the way through their four and five year terms.
What’s more, all five are lucky to have escaped serious further censure (and charges) for their extraordinary, and at times utterly contemptible, behaviour throughout the two-and-a-half week trial.
In a spectacle that betrayed contempt for basic principles of the justice system, they consistently spoke over Judge Hehir and sought to frustrate efforts to ensure a fair trial.
Meanwhile, Just Stop Oil consistently attempted to interfere with the jury and uploaded material to its social media feeds that offered a deeply prejudicial take on proceedings.
At one point during the trial it went so far as to share a tweet that called Hehir a ‘rogue judge’.
Specialist rope officers were deployed by Kent Police to remove the activists and limit disruption on the motorway during the incident in November 2022
The protests allegedly caused more than 50,000 hours of vehicle delay, affecting more than 700,000 vehicles, and left the M25 ‘compromised’ for more than 120 hours
This was, to put things mildly, the behaviour of a group of people who seem to think themselves above the law that normal citizens must follow.
Indeed, during the course of the relatively short trial, police were required to restore order in the small upstairs courtroom on no fewer than seven occasions.
In total, defendants had to be arrested nine times.
‘I have never had to order a defendant to be arrested in a courtroom before and I’m very sad to have had to do that not once, but twice today,’ said the judge, on one surreal afternoon that had seen him send jurors home early.
On occasion, Hehir, who has a light Scottish accent, resembled Rumpole of the Bailey, repeatedly shouting ‘silence in court!’ as defendants and spectators heckled him.
Behind the chaos (there is really no other way to describe it) lay a simple truth: the evidence of all five’s guilt was compelling.
It largely consisted of a recorded Zoom call, from early November 2022, in which the five defendants had orchestrated a plot to scale gantries at a variety of sites over the motorway, using climbing gear.
The purpose was to inconvenience the public.
Defendant De Abreu told activists on the call that it would be ‘the most disruptive action that anyone in the climate movement has ever done’.
A protester tried to lie on the road and prevent a van carrying the jailed activists from leaving
Unfortunately for them that meeting also happened to be attended by an undercover journalist from The Sun newspaper.
She had promptly passed a recording to the authorities.
When proceedings eventually reached Southwark Crown Court, late last month, the prosecution’s case therefore went largely uncontested.
None of the five sought to deny organising the M25 protest, which saw 64 supporters scale gantries, or to suggest that they were innocent of causing massive disruption to the public.
Instead, Hallam and his co-defendants sought to mount a defence of what they called ’reasonable excuse’.
It involved telling the jury that the urgency of the climate ’emergency’ meant that any criminal behaviour they chose to pursue was somehow justified.
Such tactics have in the past been used to great effect by Just Stop Oil and other protest groups.
After all, you often need a few members of a jury to buy this line of argument to secure an acquittal.
Only last month, three of the organisation’s activists were acquitted by a jury at Guildford Crown Court of causing criminal damage during a demonstration at Clacket Lane Services on the M25 when they blockaded the road and covered petrol pumps with spray paint, causing more than £5,000 of damage.
In May, another was acquitted of criminal damage for throwing orange paint over the New Scotland Yard sign, after her barrister likened her to Rosa Parks, who used civil disobedience during the Montgomery bus boycott.
And in November 2023, nine Just Stop Oil activists who smashed half a million pounds worth of windows at HSBC’s HQ in London, were also found not guilty.
Critics have long argued that such cases undermine public faith in the justice system by creating the impression that climate change activists can act with a sort of impunity.
As a result, the last government’s Attorney General, Victoria Prentis, asked the Court of Appeal last December to clarify whether climate protesters can rely on their beliefs to justify criminal behaviour.
Protesters show their support as a van carrying the jailed activists finally leaves the court
In March, three of the most senior judges in England and Wales ruled that evidence about their views should usually be inadmissible, meaning they cannot be put before a jury.
The clarification upheld a basic principle of the British justice system: that a person’s guilt or innocence should hinge on evidence regarding whether they did or did not commit a crime.
The question of why they might have offended is not something a jury ought to normally consider, though it can be taken into account for the purposes of sentencing.
Judge Hehir’s job required him to follow these rules to the letter. He therefore ruled that while defendants could reference climate change in brief statements about their philosophy and beliefs, it would have no bearing on the verdict.
His conditions were, however, consistently flouted. At one point, Hallam (who defended himself) delivered a three-hour speech that he admitted was ‘a little bit incoherent’ in which the jury had to be repeatedly removed from the courtroom so that Hehir could admonish him for referencing material he had ruled was irrelevant to the case.
Hallam then refused to answer cross-examination or to leave the witness box. He was eventually dragged away by police, shouting ‘democracy in action, guys!’
Shaw was arrested twice, in similar circumstances, at one point shouting, ‘Why aren’t you trying the people causing this crisis?’ while Lancaster had her collar felt for refusing to leave the witness box.
Gethin, a Cambridge University music student, was twice arrested for contempt.
At one point, various defendants stood up in the dock and began loudly reciting what they called ‘facts about climate change’ while supporters in the public gallery yelled, ‘Show trial, fake justice!’
By the time the defence case finished, Whittaker de Abreu was the only one who actually remained in the courtroom.
Adding to the sense of circus were Just Stop Oil activists outside court, who waved placards that read: ‘Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth.’
Hehir had 11 of them arrested for contempt, saying the signs were ‘clearly directed at the jury then trying the case’.
He later chose to discontinue those proceedings, partly because some of the individuals were elderly and infirm and because he suspected they had been ‘induced to come to court having been given a false or incomplete picture of what was actually happening’ by Hallam or others, and partly because any bid to illegally influence the jury had failed since all five defendants were convicted.
Another curious cameo was played by Michel Forst, a Left-wing French human rights activist employed by the UN as its ‘Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders’.
He attended the trial and posed for PR photographs with the defendants which were uploaded to Just Stop Oil’s social media feeds during proceedings.
In interviews, Forst complained that the group was ‘facing several years imprisonment for taking part in a Zoom call’.
It was a strikingly disingenous way to describe the charges against them, which of course involved orchestrating a largely successful attempt to gridlock the south-east of England for four days.
Elsewhere, things veered towards the surreal with Hallam declaring, apparently in earnest, that he was ‘the most influential environmentalist in the country apart from Sir David Attenborough’.
At one point, he was revealed to have started a crowdfunding appeal to cover ‘court fees’.
Judge Hehir pointed out that the alleged ‘court fees do not exist’ and suggested he was seeking cash from naive supporters on the basis of misinformation.
On several other occasions Hallam breached bail conditions by ‘continuing to post, or allowing others to post on his behalf, on social media’.
In another misstep, Just Stop Oil used its X account to post images of the defendants posing together, in breach of non-contact conditions that prohibited them from meeting.
‘The photograph can be timed to the last 12 months in light of the visible injury to Mr Hallam’s leg, sustained in a road traffic accident,’ the court heard.
In the end, the tactics cost them dear. While Judge Hehir made clear, during sentencing, that the behaviour of the defendants had no impact on the jail terms he was imposing, he offered a withering riposte to claims that Hallam was a reformed character who had not taken part in direct-action protests since 2022, saying: ‘He took the decision to turn the trial into a direct action protest.’
That may very well have been the intention, however.
A couple of years back, Hallam told a filmmaker: ‘My view is that if you’re not in prison, you’re not in resistance.’
On that count, he and his comrades have now finally got what they wanted.
