An eco-activist jailed for five years for paralysing the M25 has hit out at the judge who put him behind bars, branding him a ‘fanatic’.
In a letter written from prison, Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam claimed his trial judge had refused to let the jury see ‘scientific evidence’ about climate change.
Hallam, 58, and his co-defendants were given record jail terms by Judge Christopher Hehir, who told them: ‘Each of you some time ago has crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.’
Hallam said future generations would view Judge Hehir as a fanatic for his refusal to allow them to justify their actions as reasonable in the face of a climate emergency that would destroy lives.
The activist, who also co-founded protest groups Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain, wrote: ‘Judge Hehir said in the trial that these effects of what he called ‘climate change’ were ‘neither here nor there’… Can you imagine if he had said that about the 50million killed in World War II? If he had said that about the millions murdered by the Nazis?’
He went on: ‘When our children read about what Judge Hehir said, a decade from now, they will have one word to describe him: fanatic.’
Hallam said he was exercising his ‘right to respond’ after the judge’s sentencing comments were published on the front pages of several national newspapers, including the Mail, and his letter is published in this newspaper today.
The judge said the eco-activists’ stunt, which disrupted London’s M25 motorway for four days in 2022, had caused disruption and harm to others ‘simply so that you may parade your views’.
He said Hallam was ‘the ideas man’ and gave him a five-year jail term, and sentenced each of his four co-defendants to four years.
Two of them – Cressida Gethin, 22, and Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35 – issued a joint statement from prison condemning the ‘injustice of what has been done to us’, claiming their sentences reflect a ‘brokenness’ in the ‘way the country functions’.
The five were found guilty of conspiring to cause a public nuisance after the court heard they had agreed to cause disruption to traffic by having protesters climb onto gantries over the M25 on four successive days in November 2022.
Prosecutors said the protests, which involved 45 activists, caused a staggering 50,000 hours of delays affecting more than 700,000 motorists and left the M25 ‘compromised’ for more than 120 hours. The economic impact was said to be at least £765,000.
The court heard the delays meant mourners had missed funerals, travellers missed flights and students missed mock exams, and a police officer suffered concussion and bruising after being knocked off his motorbike in traffic caused by one of the protests.
The case attracted prominent support from celebrities including TV naturalist Chris Packham, who described the sentences as ‘judicial thuggery’ against ‘peaceful climate protesters’.
Celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall said the group were ‘really viciously sentenced under some extraordinary, wicked, malicious legislation’.
Green Party peer Jenny Jones took to X to call the judge ‘outstandingly ignorant’.
More than 1,000 celebrities, lawyers and academics, including Coldplay singer Chris Martin, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and artist Dame Tracey Emin have signed a letter in support of the ‘whole truth five’ and blasted the ‘injustice’ of their sentences.
The letter called for a meeting with the Attorney General over the case, and described the sentencing as ‘one of the greatest injustices in a British court’.
Hallam, a former organic farmer, was previously found guilty of a plot to close Heathrow Airport by using drones. He received a two-year sentence suspended for 18 months in 2019.
The same year, he attracted controversy when he told a German journalist the Holocaust was ‘just another f***ery in human history’, saying genocides happened repeatedly in the last 500 years, adding: ‘You might say it is like a regular event.’