Climate change protestors have come to be seen as part of a verminous brood that global fossil-fuel lobbies and corrupt, weak officials, elected or otherwise, wish to be rid of.

Getting rid of these nuisances before they eat into company budgets and government treasuries variously comes down to: silencing and intimidation; the extensive application of oppressive laws limiting protest; the use of the dumb arm of those laws (police, prosecutors, courts); and should that all fail, plain old disappearance and murder.

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It’s remarkable to think that individuals, whose only weapons are words and whose actions are limited, are given such forbidding properties. So forbidding, in fact, that they are worthy of criminalisation.

This is despite legal provisions that protect protesters’ right to take action.

As Michel Forst, UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention put it, those “taking action to defend their human right, and........

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