About Defend Our Juries
Juries of 12 randomly selected citizens put the moral intuitions of ordinary people at the heart of the criminal justice system. Over the last few years, when juries have heard evidence of why people have taken direct action to advance climate or racial justice, or to stop genocide in Gaza, they have repeatedly reached not guilty verdicts.
These verdicts are deeply embarrassing to the government and the arms and oil industries, contradicting the narrative that the public supports the ‘crackdown on protest’. Lobbyists for the arms and oil industries, such as Lord Walney and Policy Exchange, embedded within government, have been working to put a stop to them.
Lord Walney’s supposedly ‘independent’ report of May 2024 frames jury acquittals of those demanding climate and racial justice as a problem to be solved:
“Recommendation 27: The Lord Chancellor and Lady Chief Justice should convene a process to examine the potential issue of juries acquitting defendants and judges applying laws differently when they are transgressed in the name of progressive causes like climate change and anti-racism.”
As a result, extraordinary measures have been taken that violate the most basic principles of natural justice and the right to a fair trial.
People have been banned from using the words ‘climate change’ in court and jailed just for defying that prohibition. Normally available legal defences have been removed, turning jury trials into show trials, in which juries have no meaningful role to play. People have been arrested and prosecuted for displaying the centuries old constitutional principle of jury equity – the principle that a jury can acquit a defendant as a matter of conscience, irrespective of the directions of the judge. One judge in February even threatened a jury with criminal proceedings if they applied their conscience to the facts of a climate protest case.
And, now, following these stitched-up trials, more and more people are being jailed for years, for taking peaceful and proportionate action to prevent mass loss of life. In the midst of Britain’s prisons crisis.
The UN has said that what’s happening in the UK is ‘not acceptable in a democracy’ and stated publicly that these repressive measures violate international law.
Defend Our Juries has been established to shine a light on this constitutional crisis taking place in our courts.
Through mass demonstrations, which replicated her action, we exposed the insanity of prosecuting Trudi Warner for upholding the law of jury equity on a sign, culminating in the High Court rejecting the Government’s application for her committal to prison.
Now we will do the same to bring to public attention the cynical programme of measures, advanced by industry lobbyists, to silence and jail those exposing the crimes of the arms and oil industries.
