
The Metropolitan Police's decision to ban Extinction Rebellion from London last month was "unlawful," the city's high court ruled Wednesday, as CNN reported.
The police imposed the ban Oct. 14 for the last four days of Extinction Rebellion's two-week "Autumn Uprising," a campaign of civil disobedience in London intended to pressure the government into action on the climate crisis.
"Extinction Rebellion is delighted with the Court's decision," Tobias Garnett, a human rights lawyer in Extinction Rebellion's Legal Strategy team, said in an Extinction Rebellion press release. "It vindicates our belief that the Police's blanket ban on our protests was an unprecedented and unlawful infringement on the right to protest. Rather than wasting its time and money seeking to silence and criminalise those who are drawing its attention to the Climate and Ecological Emergency, we call on the Government to act now on the biggest threat to our planet."
More than 400 @XRebellionUK activists unlawfully arrested for assembling (a human right) could sue the Met Police f… https://t.co/XDTKvg7OY1— Extinction Rebellion London (@Extinction Rebellion London)1573047748.0
The police had issued the ban under Section 14 of the Public Order Act of 1986, which grants them the power to impose restrictions on assemblies that "may result in serious public disorder." But the court ruled that the police had overstepped their authority by banning a series of protests as if they were a single assembly.
"Separate gatherings, separated both in time and by many miles, even if coordinated under the umbrella of one body, are not a public assembly within the meaning of the Section 14 of the 1986 Act," Lord Justice Digemans said, according to CNN. "The XR autumn uprising intended to be held from October 14 to 19 was not therefore a public assembly ... therefore the decision to impose the condition was unlawful because there was no power to impose it under Section 14 of the 1986 Act."
Here is the crucial section of the judgement: https://t.co/LxNJsE8YQc— George Monbiot (@George Monbiot)1573036583.0
Anyone who was arrested under the ban may now sue the London police for false imprisonment, The Guardian pointed out.
"It's a very expensive mistake for the Metropolitan police," Jules Carey, part of the legal team that brought the case, told The Guardian. "I'm sure most of them would want to start off with an apology for the ordeal that they experienced, but all of them could potentially be awarded several thousands of pounds depending on how long they were arrested for and whether force was used against them."
More than 1,800 people were arrested during the two-week protests, CNN reported, and 400 were arrested after the ban.
The judicial review of the police order was brought by Green Party Members Jenny Jones, Caroline Lucas and Ellie Chowns, Labour Members of Parliament Clive Lewis and David Drew, Labour activist Adam Allnutt and Guardian columnist George Monbiot.
Chowns, a Member of European Parliament who was arrested for remaining in Trafalgar Square after the ban was announced, applauded the ruling.
"I'm delighted with this judgement because this is about fundamental democratic rights. The right to assembly and public protest are cornerstones of a functioning democracy," she said in a video shared on her Twitter feed. "Now Extinction Rebellion protesters have been raising the alarm about the climate crisis. We need to listen to that alarm, not outlaw it."
In Trafalgar Square at the place where I was unlawfully arrested three weeks ago for defending the right to protest… https://t.co/YveTsHcP5r— Ellie Chowns MEP (@Ellie Chowns MEP)1573048937.0
Extinction Rebellion launched in the UK in late October of last year and has since spread worldwide. In the UK, the group has three demands: that the government declare a climate emergency, that it act to halt biodiversity loss and achieve carbon neutrality by 2025 and that it convene a Citizens' Assembly to guide its actions on the environment.
The group's London demonstrations in October cost the police $31 million, according to CNN. For comparison, the police spend £15 million (approximately $19 million) on their violent crime task force every year.
"After eight days of continual disruption we took the decision to bring an end to this particular protest, a decision which we believe was both reasonable and proportionate," Assistant Commissioner Nick Ephgrave said in a statement reported by CNN. "I want to be clear; we would not and cannot ban protest. The condition at the center of this ruling was specific to this particular protest, in the particular circumstances at the time."
In court, it was revealed that the police ban followed an online message from Extinction Rebellion urging protesters to adopt the "be water" tactics used by demonstrators in Hong Kong, BBC News reported.
"Be water, crowds split up into fast moving groups and pairs, that network via phones," the message said. "You gather at particular spots in large numbers, until the police response building then you move to a new disruptive site."
BBC home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford said the ruling would make it hard for the police to control similar protests in the future:
Today's High Court ruling takes away from officers the ability to impose a city-wide ban of future protests, which means demonstrators wanting to be "like water" - where they split into fast-moving groups - will be difficult to control if they are trying to disrupt a whole city.
So police will have to deal with what is in front of them.
If a specific protest in a specific place gets out of hand they will be able to close it down, but it will have to be a decision made by an officer on the spot, and not by someone sitting in a police station worrying about what protests may happen the next day.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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