Campaign groups call on Home Office to stop ‘steady erosion’ of protest rights

Environmental groups are among 92 civil society organisations who have warned Yvette Cooper against “the steady erosion of the right to protest” in the UK, and called on her to reverse the previous government’s crackdown on peaceful protest .

“The right to protest is a vital safety valve for our democracy and an engine of social progress,” the letter, delivered on Friday, said. “The achievements of peaceful protest are written on the labour movement’s own birth certificate.”

“[We] urge this government to intervene to reverse the crackdown on peaceful protest set in motion under the last government,” the letter continues.

“The responsibility for it lies firmly with the previous administration – but the current government now faces a clear choice between allowing its dire consequences to play out under its watch, or do something to prevent it.”

Related: ‘Not acceptable in a democracy’: UN expert condemns lengthy Just Stop Oil sentences

Signatories include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Wildlife and Countryside Link and a host of other environmental campaigning organisations, alongside Amnesty International UK, Liberty and dozens of human rights, free speech and social justice groups.

The letter has been prompted in part by the jailing of five Just Stop Oil activists for a total of 21 years after they appeared on a Zoom call recruiting volunteers for non-violent disruptive protests that blocked the M25 over four days in 2022.

But it also notes that the stiff sentences “are not an isolated incident”. Anti-protest legislation passed in 2022 and 2023, and successful efforts by attorneys general to remove legal defences in protest cases, constituted “a deliberate strategy by previous governments to criminalise and shrink the space for peaceful protest,” the letter said.

The groups call on Cooper to join them in roundtable discussions “to hear directly from a selection of key groups across civil society about these issues”.

“We can’t afford to become a country that routinely sends peaceful protesters to jail for years,” said Areeba Hamid, the co-executive director of Greenpeace UK. “Protest can be annoying and inconvenient, but it’s annoying and inconvenient protest that has led to the end of slavery, votes for women, basic workers’ rights and the bans on nuclear testing and commercial whaling.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We recognise the democratic right that people must be free to peacefully express their views, but they should do so within the bounds of the law. Protest organisers should engage fully with the police. The letter has been received and we will respond in due course.”