The UK government isn't coming to save us. The legal system isn’t going to either.

The UK government isn't coming to save us. The legal system isn’t going to either.

Currently the UK and international legal system and judiciary is both unable and unwilling to do what’s needed to save the children, and all future generations. Not only do we not yet have the right laws in place such as the law against commiting ‘Ecocide’ to hold individuals in governments and corporations to account, our lawyers and judges are acting in complicity with ecocide and climate genocide.

This might sound like a bold claim, but believe me, after spending two weeks of my life on trial in Southwark Crown Court with my six co-defendants I have felt it in my bones.

The seven of us (‘Barclays 7’) carefully cracked 6 windows of Barclays HQ in Canary Wharf on 7th April 2021, to call them out for being the biggest fossil fuel funder in Europe, and to send a message of love around the banking world that it is time to wake up to the catastrophic and irreversible harm they are causing whilst earning bonuses.

After a long 19-month wait, our trial began on 22nd November 2022. Our Judge, His Honour Judge Alexander Milne, explained before we gave evidence that the Court accepted that climate change was real and if I recall rightly, also acknowledged that we could be said to be in a climate crisis. On the face of it this sounds positive - the problem is that the Courts mirror the rest of the UK Government and the establishment in saying one thing and doing another. Worse than this, Judge Milne said that therefore we weren’t required to ‘prove’ climate change was real or a problem, and so in fact added to the silencing effect on us and the restriction of the evidence we were allowed to put in front of the Jury.?

When we took our action, not only did we carefully plan to avoid harm to any living being, we also believed (and still believe) that we had lawful excuse. We were acting out of Necessity to prevent a much greater crime.?

Given we are only years, if that, away from triggering a cascade of irreversible tipping points in the earth’s systems which means that everyone faces losing Everything, Forever - any reasonable person who understands that banks are fueling this madness would see cracking a pane of glass as a proportionate act to try to raise the alarm!

And yet the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) (ie, the State), and the Judiciary argued that the defence of ‘Necessity’ did not apply in our case because in a “functioning state” there are always other ‘lawful means’ to use to achieve change.

Where to start with that one! Nurses depending on food banks, shit in rivers, a government breaking its own net zero law, a collapsing NHS and care system, bought crooked politicians, more UK billionaires than ever, and that’s just the tip of the dysfunctional iceberg.

There are many thousands of us who've been using all the polite, legal routes to try to influence change. I was allowed to explain briefly to the Jury some of the things I've tried over the last 40 years, but funnily enough you can't persuade a global corporation to stop maximising its short term profits by writing them letters!

During the two week trial the Jury were not allowed to see a single piece of evidence on the climate and ecological crisis, and Barclays’ role in funding it. In a system which is creating political prisoners of citizens who dare to speak the bleeding obvious, our case was reduced to a ‘simple question’ of breaking glass.

And to make matters worse, the Jury don't know what they don't know… the arguments about which legal defences we would and wouldn’t be allowed all take place in their absence, so that the proceedings may seem fair to them when this is far from the case.

Our Judge also ultimately agreed with the CPS/prosecution and decided that the defence of ‘Necessity’ didn’t apply because there was no direct “nexus”, ie, that our action could not have in his view prevented the harms we were describing. I stood up as a self-representing defendant and asked, “Your Honour, what action would meet this requirement? Would I need to attach myself to a fracking well?”. I received no answer. I sat down and sobbed in desperation on my co-defendant's shoulder, not for myself, but for all those already dying and suffering.

So you see, we are boxed in and gagged, in front of a Jury of our peers who are barely told what’s going on, and no doubt feel the weight of the authority of the system telling them what to do.?

In addition, since Suella Braverman’s appeal of the Coulston judgement, the defence of ‘proportionality’ in protest cases (ie, Article 10 and 11 of the EHRA), has also been effectively removed from citizens who commit acts of ‘criminal damage’ to call out much greater harm.?

By the end, we were left with a single legal defence by the Judge on which the Jury were instructed to judge us and our evidence, such as we were allowed to present. If the Prosecutor had had her way we would have been left without any defence in law at all.

Our peers were to judge us ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ solely on whether they were convinced that at the time we cracked the glass, we believed that those people able to consent to the damage would have consented had they ‘known of the circumstances’. (A defence known as ‘belief in consent’).

Now, I will believe to my dying day that ANYONE, no matter whether Nigel Higgins the Chair of Barclays plc, or a shareholder, would consent to some glass being carefully cracked if they knew what I knew, felt what I feel, and see what I see - the very fabric of life being destroyed, the sheer volume of pain and suffering, and a deep appreciation of the non-linear acceleration of it’s worsening. But sadly this is a defence that it is easy to diminish in the eyes of 12 members of the public, especially when as defendants we were not allowed to provide any actual evidence of the harms Barclays is contributing to, and could only speak of our subjective beliefs.

Decades of peer reviewed science, and the very survival of civilization at stake, and yet it all had to be reduced in the eyes of the Court to the subjective beliefs of 7 ‘emotional’ women.

And to add to the appalling surreality of proceedings, the prosecuting barrister in her summing up, told the Jury (12 ordinary people with a majority people of colour and a majority women), that if they acquitted us on the basis of our “belief in consent”, then that would open the door to the EDL, and anti-abortion campaigners doing criminals acts and using the same defence! These culture war games were more akin to a far-right GB News presenter than a legal professional. She also used such superficial examples in court, like ‘belief in consent’ that you could paint someone’s room pink - trying to create some bizarre equivalence. As if you can in any way compare this ridiculous example with seeking to avoid 3,500,000,000 ment, women and children being in unsurvivable heat by 2070. I was lost for words at her apparent ignorance and unprofessionalism.

Inevitably my Jewish heritage drives me to think of the Holocaust. If you were told that by doing some minor damage you might help raise the alarm and in some small way help prevent another Holocaust from happening, would you do it? What if you knew, as climate scientists do, that without massive action the truth of the coming horrors is nearer the scale of 100 or more Holocausts, with irreversible horror for all future generations? Would you raise your hammer then?

No wonder the former Barrister and Government lawyer Tim Crossland has renounced his professional status as an act of protest and conscience over what he describes as “the British courts’ support for climate genocide”.?

Whilst a small proportion of the UK’s lawyers and judges have the courage to speak the truth, warning that breaching the 1.5?C Paris Agreement threshold threatens mass loss of life and the end of the rule of law, just like the vast majority of lawyers in Nazi Germany, almost all are turning a blind eye, propping up the status quo, or worse profiteering from the harm.?

I make a plea to all members of the legal profession - Speak up, Stand up and Act up now before it is too late, or in years to come you will find it is you and not us in the dock.

Zoe Cohen - January 2023