Amnesty International: Civil disobedience is increasingly criminalized worldwide, despite its vital role in confronting government and corporate abuses, especially amid the climate crisis and other human rights emergencies. This post identifies three legal strategies that can counter punitive state responses and protect activists: invoking the necessity defence, asserting freedom of expression, and leveraging protections stemming from the right to a healthy environment. Strengthening and expanding these strategies offers a blueprint for defending activists and resisting the criminalization of civil disobedience.
Around the world, today as much as in the past, people choose to break the law in pursuit of social, economic, and racial justice, especially in the face of rampant human rights abuses by governments and corporations. From Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes in protest against slavery and the genocide of Native Americans in the 19th century, to the Salt March in India in the 1930s against the British ban on producing salt locally, to Rosa Parks’ refusal in 1955 to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama (United States) in defiance of racial segregation, civil disobedience has been a key tactic to challenge slavery, colonialism, and racism.
Today, the climate emergency, the genocide in Gaza, austerity measures, homophobia and transphobia, and the deadly consequences of migration policies are among the pressing issues motivating people to engage in civil disobedience, which entails acts that, although peaceful, deliberately breach the law for reasons of conscience.
These acts—including, for example, trespassing on private property, interrupting the operations of companies causing environmental harm, or blocking traffic— are often met with arrests, prosecutions, and harsh penalties. In the United Kingdom, for example, 16 Just Stop Oil activists were convicted of public nuisance and criminal for four different acts of civil disobedience, including throwing soup on the Van Gogh’s Sunflower painting in October 2022 and blocking the M25 motorway in November 2022, receiving sentences ranging from fifteen months to five years. In March 2025, the Court of Appeal slightly reduced the sentences of six activists, while dismissing the appeals of the others.
State authorities often justify punitive responses to civil disobedience in the name of public interest, to deter other people from committing similar acts in the future or to provide remedies to those who suffered damages. However, as we argue in this post, prosecuting and sanctioning individuals for civil disobedience, which is non-violent by definition, is often not in the public interest.
Read full article on Repression of Civil Disobedience: Pathways to Protect Activists
