It was a few days ago, at the court in Wolverhampton, England. Graham Wilkinson was to try seven activists, two women and five men, of the environmental movement Just Stop Oil, for having sat on the road leading to the oil terminal of the Esso group, in Birmingham, and thus having blocked all entry and exit. The youngest is a 20-year-old biology student, the oldest a 68-year-old pensioner and the action was organized to urge the British government to stop issuing new oil and gas exploration permits. It was in April 2022, they held out for 12 hours before being dislodged, arrested, then prosecuted for illegal occupation of a private road.
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“Good people with good intentions”
Judge Wilkinson has therefore just recognized them guilty, and condemned them, while welcoming their good intentions when the verdict was announced: “Of coursehe launched according to the full account published by the BBC, it is obvious that the man-made warming is real, it is also obvious that we are facing a climate crisis, so no one can speak out against the motivations that you have stated, to preserve this planet not only for future generations but also for the present generations, you expressed them in a very touching way, in any case I was touched. In short, you’re good people with good intentions, admirable purpose, but when good people do bad things, it never turns bad things into good deeds.”
And Graham Wilkinson recalls that, despite the ethical dilemma in which this type of case can place a judge, any society needs to have confidence in its justice, and that to do this its laws must apply to all, in a way equal, whatever the intentions.
The judge therefore found them guilty of occupying a private road and sentenced them to fines ranging from 250 to 500 pounds sterling, enough to remind us that a court does not judge morality but the application of the law, the law which is also the essential framework without which the polluters, the greedy, the ill-intentioned would have neither limit nor control. What Graham Wilkinson says to those he calls”good people with good intentions“is that betting on morality in court will never lead to anything, or just being told that the climate crisis is real and that fighting to save what can still be saved is admirable. be that changing the spirit of the laws starts with that.