Liberty Sounds Alarm as UK Anti-Protest Laws Silence Climate Activists

The fifth heatwave of a punishing British summer is tearing through a country where the right to protest it has been systematically strangled. With two-thirds of the UK now under drought and wildfires still burning across the country, the human rights organisation Liberty has warned that successive waves of anti-protest legislation have created a "chilling effect" on climate demonstrators — criminalising the very people trying to sound the alarm.

A decade of legislative extraction

What we are watching is not coincidence. It is design. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023, and the Crime and Policing Act 2026 form a single, unbroken project: to render dissent against a fossil-fuel-driven economy too costly, too frightening, and too legally treacherous to attempt. The tools are blunt but ruthlessly effective. Unlimited fines for those found in breach of the Public Order Act. Prison sentences measured not in weeks but in years.

In July 2024, five Just Stop Oil activists received four to five years for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance under the PCSC Act — for discussing an M25 protest on Zoom. Only on appeal, supported by Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK, did a court deem those sentences "manifestly excessive," reducing them to between 2.5 and four years. Let that land: people coordinating a sit-in online now serve time that would have been unthinkable for comparable non-environmental offences a decade ago.

The numbers, and the silence

The state's own figures confirm the pattern. Since 2022, roughly 90 percent of protests against which police restrictions were applied were classified as "environment" related. An entire architecture of enforcement, pointed squarely at a single movement. The Network for Police Monitoring has condemned the Home Office dataset for lacking "openness and transparency" — a damning indictment of an administration that demands accountability from everyone except itself.

Worse: the Crime and Policing Act 2026 was pushed through Parliament before Lord Macdonald's Independent Review of Public Order and Hate Crime Legislation could be published. The government legislated ahead of its own commissioned review, because it already knew what that review would likely recommend.

The public versus the apparatus

And yet, the public is ahead of the politicians. A recent Ipsos poll shows 74 percent of Britons now concerned about climate change following this summer of extremes, up from 69 percent before it. Three-quarters of the country demanding action. Westminster's answer: more laws to silence the messengers.

Ruth Ehrlich, Liberty's Director of External Relations, put it plainly: "New restrictions, new offences and a raft of new penalties have given police immense powers to crack down on climate demonstrations and continue to have a chilling effect on protest. Taken together these have created an incredibly difficult environment for climate protesters who now face immense personal risks. Protest makes our democracy more resilient, our government more responsive and drives the political salience of critical issues like climate change." Reshima Sharma, Deputy Head of Politics at Greenpeace UK, has echoed the call for the new Prime Minister to change course from his predecessors.

The material contradiction could not be starker. Drought. Wildfires. A fifth heatwave. And the state doubling down on silencing the people trying to warn them about it. They are not governing. They are insulating the extractive economy from consequence — one piece of legislation at a time.