Bearing witness

I can’t write about heavy-handed police tactics without mentioning recent events in Kent. The Kingsnorth Climate Camp is a perfect example of why the right to photograph in public places is important: because otherwise actions like those shown here would go unrecorded and unreported.

Good journalism is all about accountability: holding others to account, being accountable for your own actions. Accountability is the difference between surveillance and bearing witness. The climate camp protesters were bearing witness to E.ON's plans to create a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Without the camp, the proposed power station might have been built without ever becoming a big national news story.

But protest as a way of bearing witness is nothing without reporting and photography, because the right to speak is nothing without the ability to be heard. So it's good news that many reporters and photographers were on site to tell the story of the climate camp, despite intimidation from local police.

Perhaps the ultimate and most effective way of bearing witness is to go to court. While the threat of legal action can often frighten people into silence, there are examples of activists using the courts as a way of subjecting an issue to wider scrutiny. The McLibel case used to be the most famous example, but perhaps the acquittal of the Kingsnorth Six will be seen in future as even more important.

The defence of the Kingsnorth Six was that they had "lawful excuse" to cause £30,000 worth of damage to a smokestack at Kingsnorth in October 2007, because they were acting to prevent the much greater damage that would be caused to property around the world by climate change. Professor James Hansen, former adviser to the White House on climate change, was a witness for the defence. He spent an hour and a half on the witness stand, explaining why preventing new coal-fired power stations is a matter of urgency.

"The simple but shocking truth is we have gone too far. We place our planetary system, inhabitants and future generations in grave peril... If we are to preserve the planet that civilisation has grown on, we have to go back. [...] Humans are now in charge of atmospheric CO2 and the global climate... It's up to those of us alive today to take the bold steps needed."

The jury's decision to acquit the Kingsnorth Six of criminal damage sets a legal precedent potentially justifying future damage to property in order to stop climate change. Professor Hansen told the court that the social cost of emitting one tonne of CO2 is around £50, according to the Stern Report. So if shutting down Kingsnorth power station stopped 20,000 tonnes of CO2 from being released per day, the action in October 2007 saved about £1 million worth of damage for each day it was shut down. Protester Ben Stewart (a law graduate) argued that the £30,000 damage caused in October 2007 was a proportionate response, as Judge Caddick reminded the jury in his summing-up.

But for me, the most important thing about the trial was that it allowed the six protesters to bear witness to the damage caused by climate change. They managed (with the help of five defence witnesses) to highlight the urgency of the problem and bring the scientific evidence about climate change into the public space of the court.

The behaviour of police at Kingsnorth was in sharp contrast to the public witness-bearing from protesters, reporters, photographers and expert witnesses. According to a recent report in the Press Gazette, card-carrying journalists at the climate camp were "pushed and shoved" and secretly filmed.There are many unfunny ironies to how events unfolded at Kingsnorth, but I smiled when I discovered that many of the photojournalists under police surveillance were filmed as they used the wi-fi in a local branch of McDonald's.