Comment: Climate protests surged in 2018-2019 and have continued, sparking a crackdown by authorities using the law to criminalise and constrain activism
Oscar Berglund is a senior lecturer in international public and social policy at the University of Bristol and Tie Franco Brotto is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies.
Climate and environmental protest is being criminalised and repressed around the world. The criminalisation of such protest has received a lot of attention in certain countries, including the UK and Australia. But there have not been any attempts to capture the global trend – until now.
We recently published a report, with three University of Bristol colleagues, which shows this repression is indeed a global trend – and that it is becoming more difficult around the world to stand up for climate justice.
This criminalisation and repression spans the global north and south, and includes more and less democratic countries. It does, however, take different forms.
Our report distinguishes between climate and environmental protest. The latter are campaigns against specific environmentally destructive projects – most commonly oil and gas extraction and pipelines, deforestation, dam building and mining. They take place all around the world.
Climate protests are aimed at mitigating climate change by decreasing carbon emissions, and tend to make bigger policy or political demands (“cut global emissions now” rather than “don’t build this power plant”). They often take place in urban areas and are more common in the global north.
Four ways to repress activism
The intensifying criminalisation and repression is taking four main forms.
1. Anti-protest laws are introduced
Anti-protest laws may give the police more powers to stop protest, introduce new criminal offences, increase sentence lengths for existing offences, or give policy impunity when harming protesters. In the 14 countries we looked at, we found 22 such pieces of legislation introduced since 2019.
2. Protest is criminalised through prosecution and courts
This can mean using laws against climate and environmental activists that were designed to be used against terrorism or organised crime. In Germany, members of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a direct action group in the mould of Just Stop Oil, were charged in May 2024 with “forming a criminal organisation”. This section of the law is typically used against mafia organisations and had never been applied to a non-violent group.
In the Philippines, anti-terrorism laws have been used against environmentalists who have found themselves unable to return to their home islands.
Criminalising protest can also mean lowering the threshold for prosecution, preventing climate activists from mentioning climate change in court, and changing other court processes to make guilty verdicts more likely. Another example is injunctions that can be taken out by corporations against activists who protest against them.
3. Harsher policing
This stretches from stopping and searching to surveillance,