Climate activists are particularly vulnerable to arrest and persecution
Originally published on Global Voices
A climate protest in Copenhagen. Image from Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
This post is part of Global Voices’ September 2026 Spotlight series, “Protest in Democracy.” With this Spotlight, we seek to explore the many forms of protest, the tactics states use to delegitimize and suppress them, and the complex relationship between protest and democracy. You can support this coverage by donating here.
Across Europe, governments are using criminal laws against climate and environmental protesters — a phenomenon that shows few signs of retreating. A comparative study published in late 2025, examining 14 countries across the Global North and South, found that criminalization forms part of a wider pattern of repression. Researchers identified not only arrests, but new anti-protest laws, the strategic use of existing laws and legal processes, surveillance, harassment, and the public vilification of activists.
The numbers illustrate the scale of the response. Research on climate protests found that 17.2 percent of protests in the United Kingdom resulted in arrests, compared with an international average of 6.3 percent. In Berlin, prosecutors received 5,681 proceedings connected with the climate movement Letzte Generation (Last Generation) between January 2022 and October 2025, although almost half were eventually discontinued.
The trend has continued in 2026. In July, a French appellate court upheld convictions against four environmental defenders for organizing the prohibited Sainte-Soline protest against large agricultural water reservoirs. Days later in Turkey, environmental activist Esra Işık was sentenced to two years and one month in prison, pending appeal, after having already spent 42 days in pretrial detention following a peaceful protest connected with the expansion of coal mining around Akbelen Forest. Likewise, in Australia, 138 people were arrested after blocking a coal ship from docking at a busy port.
In Australia, 138 people were arrested for preventing a coal ship from docking at a busy port. Screenshot from YouTube.
Yet international human rights experts have been moving in another direction. In October 2025, Michel Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on environmental defenders under the Aarhus Convention, issued dedicated Guidelines on the Right to Peaceful Environmental Protest and Civil Disobedience. They call on states to avoid using civil disobedience to restrict civic space and to ensure that sanctions against peaceful protesters are necessary and proportionate. In March 2026, several UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteurs expressed their strong support for the Guidelines.
Against this background, what is happening in Strasbourg’s European Court on Human Rights (ECtHR) deserves particular attention.
What happened in Strasbourg?
The ECtHR in Strasbourg has long played an important role in defining how far European governments can go in restricting protest and political expression. Its judgments set human rights standards for the 46 countries of the Council of Europe.
Environmental protest has been part of this story. In Bryan and Others v. Russia, the Court found that the rights of Greenpeace activists had been violated after they were detained following a protest against Arctic oil drilling. In Friedrich and Others v. Poland, it reached a similar conclusion after activists protesting against a coal shipment were detained in Gdańsk. Both cases reflected Strasbourg’s recognition that political protest can be inconvenient, unconventional, and disruptive and still deserve protection.
Then came Ludes and Others v. France: In 2019, activists from the non-violent climate movement ANV-COP21 removed official portraits of President Emmanuel Macron from town halls across France, leaving the walls empty to symbolize what they considered the government’s insufficient action on climate change. The activists called it a temporary “requisition” of the portraits, but French authorities called it theft.
Before the ECtHR, activists argued that their convictions violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of expression. The Court recognized that their action was non-violent, carried a political message and concerned climate change, unquestionably a matter of public interest. Yet in July 2025, by five votes to two, it found no violation of Article 10.
The majority distinguished between removing the portraits and keeping them. Taking them down had already communicated the message, it reasoned, and refusing to return them could therefore be punished as theft. The suspended fines of EUR 200–500 were considered relatively modest. However, two dissenting judges argued that the two acts could not be separated so easily: The continuing absence of the portraits was itself part of the political message. They also warned against using criminal law too readily against peaceful political activists.
This case did not remove climate protest from the protection of freedom of expression. But Strasbourg recognized the political message, the peaceful character of the action and the importance of the climate debate, and still allowed a criminal conviction to stand. The question is therefore not simply whether dissent is protected, but what remains of that protection when dissent deliberately disrupts the ordinary rules.
When protest comes at a price
Protest brings together two basic democratic freedoms: the right to speak and the right to assemble. But its importance goes further. It allows people to challenge those in power between elections, to make dissent visible and bring issues into public debate when established political channels fail to do so. Many rights now taken for granted (from workers’ rights, women’s political participation to civil rights and environmental protections), were advanced not through institutions alone, but also by people who marched, organized, and disrupted ordinary life.
This is why the growing criminalization of protest matters beyond the fate of individual activists. A state does not have to abolish the right to protest to weaken it. The right may remain protected on paper while arrests, prosecution, financial penalties and lengthy legal proceedings gradually raise the price of exercising it. The prospect of arrest or prosecution can itself affect whether others are willing to speak, assemble or join the next protest.
Since the 1950s, Europe’s democratic and human rights system has developed through the gradual strengthening of protections for political expression, assembly and dissent. Threats to that tradition do not necessarily arrive as sweeping restrictions or new anti-protest laws. They can also emerge more quietly, through changes in how existing rights are interpreted and balanced against public order, property or criminal law.
A judgment such as Ludes may appear narrow: a few activists, several presidential portraits and relatively small suspended fines. But such interpretations help define the space in which future protest takes place. Following the criminalization of protest therefore means looking not only at what legislators and governments do, but also at the less visible shifts in how courts draw the boundaries of democratic dissent.
