Nicola Cutcher

It was a pleasure and privilege to interview Chris Packham for New Humanist magazine. Packham’s energy is infectious and inspiring. He’s in a fight to save life on earth and he’s unstoppable.

We talked about his activism, how attacks on him only fuel his determination to fight harder, his autism, and never winning the approval of his parents.

We also discussed how climate activists are being treated in the courts, and since this article was published, Cressie Gethin (the 22 year old student who Packham met and gave evidence for in a previous court case) has just been sentenced to four years in prison for her role in helping to organise the Just Stop Oil protests on motorway gantries.

When injunctions are deployed against protesters, they can make actions ‘doubly illegal’. Protesters who, for example, block a road, find themselves falling foul of two laws: the criminal law (because blocking a road is illegal) and the civil law (because National Highways Ltd has taken out an injunction to stop people blocking roads). If you break an injunction, you break a court order, which puts you in contempt of court and you can face up to two years in prison and unlimited fines.

I wrote about this for Prospect magazine, interviewing lawyers and activists about the phenomenon. My piece opens with a description of activists Tez Burns and Callum Goode glued to the gates of the Royal Courts of Justice in a protest against the justice system itself and what they see as the scandal of injunctions. You can watch a video of their protest here.