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Climate change protestors have come to be seen as part of a verminous brood that global fossil-fuel lobbies and corrupt, weak officials, elected or otherwise, wish to be rid of.

Getting rid of these nuisances before they eat into company budgets and government treasuries variously comes down to: silencing and intimidation; the extensive application of oppressive laws limiting protest; the use of the dumb arm of those laws (police, prosecutors, courts); and should that all fail, plain old disappearance and murder.

It’s remarkable to think that individuals, whose only weapons are words and whose actions are limited, are given such forbidding properties. So forbidding, in fact, that they are worthy of criminalisation.

This is despite legal provisions that protect protesters’ right to take action.

As Michel Forst, UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention , those “taking action to defend their human right, and the human right of future generations, to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as recognized by the United Nations General Assembly”.

Given the urgency posed by the threat of climate change, and the “inadequate response from governments”, the peaceful protest has found expression in various ways, including various actions that may “cause disruption in the public space”.

This makes the Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protest, by researchers based at the University of Bristol, all the more pertinent.

The study addresses the patterns of criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest around the world and the various laws and powers that have been introduced and used. For reasons of focus, 14 countries are examined in greater depth.

The report, using data from Armed Conflict Location and Event Data and Global Witness, elucidates a tendency that has become all too common.

First, this punitive policy shifts the focus away from taking action against climate change, and instead punishes those who oppose inertia and inactivity in the face of it.

Secondly, these policies are authoritarian in nature and inconsistent “with the ideals of vibrant civil societies in liberal democracies”.

The most severe example of this attack on environmental defenders is the chilling policy of murder and disappearance.

The non-government organisation Global Witness reports that 2106 killings of climate protestors took place between 2012 and 2023.

The Global South, notably Latin America, is particularly notable in this regard: the dishonourable list includes Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Honduras.

In wealthier states, the climate change protester may be safer, but hardly immune from state violence.

Countries that either openly or ostensibly accept freedom of assembly protections and the right to protest — in this case the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia — have been enthusiastically enacting laws that increase sentences for non-violent protest and negligible acts of sabotage. (The report points to the damage inflicted on a statue as an example.)

Arrests of such protestors in Australia and Britain are above the international average: 20% and 17% respectively.

The authors also write about the “secondary” criminalisation of climate and environmental protests, which involves applying, sometimes inventively, laws that are already on the books.

A popular choice is the evoking of anti-terrorism powers and the declaration of states of emergency to enable the extraction industries to continue their work unimpeded.

On the issue of oppressive laws, Australia has become something of a leader.

Novel pieces of legislation that chip away and smother civil liberties is something of a specialty, encouraged by the glaring absence of a federal bill of rights.

Since 2019, the states of Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia have all passed anti-protest laws.

Australia’s Environmental Defenders Office, in collaboration with the Human Rights Law Centre and Greenpeace, affirms the tendency in its 2021 , further noting the prioritisation of deterrence and denunciation in sentencing practices in courts “particularly when climate defenders do not express remorse or contrition for their activism”.

Broadly speaking, strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) has become government and corporate’ weapon of choice in litigation.

Environmental groups have also been the subject of extensive surveillance and infiltration by government agencies and corporations friendly to the extraction agenda.

Environmental defenders are slandered by the publicity machines of governments, in league with private interests. They are pictured as privileged, pampered “rabble rousers”.

Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest extractor, is the . “My question to the short-sighted is this: Do you really think we could survive without mining?”

The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres sees it differently. “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals,” he in a video message in April 2022. “But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”

To this could be added the radical danger of continuing to hide the true cost of the extraction market.

[Binoy Kampmark currently lectures at RMIT University.]