Last month, in Germany, five members of climate action group Letzte Generation were arrested. The reason: they are charged with forming a criminal organisation. It’s the first time ever in Germany that a fully peaceful climate action group has been labeled a criminal organisation.

In case you don’t know them: Letzte Generation is a German climate movement, comparable to Extinction Rebellion in the Netherlands. The movement protests for necessary, just climate policies. Their protests often take the form of civil disobedience. This includes road blocks, but also disrupting or blocking oil refineries and brown coal delving projects. Disruptive, but completely non-violent and peaceful protest. And now the movement is being treated as a criminal organisation.

This is shameful and shocking, but it’s not a unique case. In many European countries, peaceful climate activists are increasingly criminalised more often and in harsher ways. The list of examples is long, but this is a selection of them:

Criminalisation of climate actions abroad

Last year, German police also carried out house searches at the houses of members of Letzte Generation, and German climate activists are frequently held in preventative detention. In other words: jail time without having done anything. Earlier this year, in Spain, 22 climate activists of climate group Futuro Vegetal were also arrested and charged with forming a criminal organisation. The French government has accused climate action group Les Soulèments de la Terre of terrorism and has tried to forcibly dissolve them, complete with raids and arrests by the police’s anti-terrorism unit. The French Council of State has ruled that this was unjust and disproportional.

In the United Kingdom, the government has been passing laws for several years that increasingly restrict the right to protest. For example, the government has tried to significantly lower the threshold at which police could dissolve protests. This ultimately failed because the UK High Court ruled it was unlawful, but that doesn’t always happen.

The British government did succesfully enact a major increase in the severity of sentences, making it so that under the label of “public nuisance”, peaceful protestors can be locked up for months or even years. Activists of Just Stop Oil that marched on a road have already been sentenced to jail times of half a year. According to a UN special rapporteur, peaceful protestors haven’t been sentenced to jail time in the UK since the 1930s, until now. On top of that, climate activists on trial are often not allowed to use the word “climate” in their defence, and sometimes they have to wait for their trial with an electronic ankle band and a curfew, which can take up to two years. For peaceful protestors – that haven’t even been convicted yet! - that is ridiculously disproportional.

Criminalisation in the Netherlands

And this trend of criminalisation can be seen in the Netherlands too. Last year, the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights already said that the right to protest in the Netherlands is under pressure, and that isn’t without reason.

The Dutch police has been illegally spying on activists for years. They’ve been creating massive files on activists, often without any substantiated suspicions or reasoning, and they’ve even been internationally labelling innocent activists as “terrorists”. Climate activists have been preventatively arrested here too, which minister of Justice and Security Dilan Yeşilgöz applauded. In February, the ministry of Justice and Security announced that police would start taking action against protestors quicker and harsher. Last month, the outgoing cabinet even announced that they’ve started research on how to limit the right to protest. How much more explicit can you get?

And I don’t see this getting any better with the upcoming cabinet either. Geert Wilders (PVV) has been ranting about “climate crazies” and “woke terror” for ages, and he’s labeled Extinction Rebellion as “left extremists” multiple times. VVD MP’s consistently speak of “abuse of the right to protest”, and they actively demonise climate protestors by comparing their protests with terrorism. BBB is already calling for labelling Extinction Rebellion as a criminal organisation. VVD party leader Yeşilgöz, in her role as minister, has even said she’ll discuss this with the Public Prosecution Service.

It should be obvious that all of these verbal attacks from the political world are nothing but opportunistic populism. Why else do we only consistently hear this kind of language about peaceful climate protestors, and not about – for example – farmers’ organisations like Farmers Defence Force that actively call for violence, intimidate people, use violence publicly and send out death threats? But the scary thing about yelling by politicians in a government coalition is that the yelling can easily be turned into actual policy.

I should mention this trend isn’t unique to climate activists. Just look at the recent protests against the mass murders in Gaza, where peaceful protestors were also charged by riot police, and politicians accuse them all of being antisemitic terrorism-apologists.

A dangerous trend

This is a dangerous development. Not only is this a crystal clear suppression of the right to protest (and in the case of the protestors for Gaza also of their freedom of speech), but criminalising one kind of protestor leads to criminalising of all protests. And when steps towards criminalisation are tolerated time and time again, then the measures the government takes will only become more and more extreme. Such developments often go gradually, but that’s exactly why you need to put a stop to it early, before the right to protest is hollowed out completely. And in my opinion, we’re a good while past ‘early’.

This trend needs to be put to an end urgently. Peaceful civilly disobedient protesting is not criminal, but a right. A right that needs to be defended fundamentally and intensely. And that’s a responsibility of all of us. Steps back are made easily. Steps forward again, are not.

In addition I want to add that right now, hundreds of thousands of people are already dying every year due to the consequences of the climate crisis and our treatment of the Earth. According to some researchers, this could even already be the case for millions of deaths per year, and according to the UN, in many places climate change is already becoming deadlier than cancer. And in the mass murders in Gaza, over 12.000 Palestinian children have already been murdered. That’s more child victims than in all other armed conflicts globally of the last four years combined. No matter how hard governments try to suppress protests that raise awareness for this, it won’t change these facts.