Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg appeared before a court in the Southern Swedish city of Malmo on Monday, July 24th, and has been found guilty of disobeying police, Reuters reports.
The 20-year-old refused to comply with police orders to leave the port of Malmo on June 19th, where she and fellow climate alarmists had stopped traffic in the oil terminal of the port. Thunberg and the other activists were detained. They “took part in a demonstration that disrupted traffic” and “refused to obey police orders to leave the site,” according to the charge sheet seen by AFP.
Although Thunberg faced a maximum sentence of six months in prison, the court decided to issue her a fine. The crime of disobedience is typically punishable with fines.
The group, Reclaim the Future, blockaded the Malmo port for six days in June. They tried to block the entrance and exit to the harbour; some protestors climbed on top of oil tankers. “The climate crisis is a matter of life and death for countless people. We choose to physically stop fossil fuel infrastructure. We are reclaiming the future,” Greta Thunberg tweeted during the protest.
Police first asked the activists to leave, and then had to forcefully carry them to the side of the road. Some members of the group tried to block the road for a second time, resulting in police officers detaining them and driving them away from the port, before releasing them. As prosecutor Charlotte Ottosen emphasised, freedom to demonstrate did not extend to the right to cause a disturbance for others.
Thunberg pleaded not guilty on Monday, saying that her actions were justifiable. “I believe that we are in an emergency that threatens life, health and property. Countless people and communities are at risk both in the short term and in the long term,” she said. It is not yet clear how much she will have to pay, but the fine will be based on her income.
Greta Thunberg made a name for herself in 2018 at the age of 15 by skipping school every Friday and protesting outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm for tougher action by politicians against climate change. Her protests sparked a global movement, with children all over the world taking to the streets on Fridays, a movement known as Fridays for Future. She has publicly chided world leaders in a number of speeches, most notably at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in 2019, accusing world leaders of stealing her dreams and her childhood by their inaction on climate change. Before the incident in Malmo, Thunberg had previously been detained by police in March in Oslo during a demonstration against wind farms built on Indigenous land, and in January, in the German village of Lützerath, while protesting against the extension of a lignite mine.
Greta Thunberg’s actions have inspired other climate activists in Europe to take radical steps in the name of climate protection. Members of these extremist groups—such as Last Generation and Just Stop Oil—have disrupted sporting events, staged arson attacks, destroyed valuable works of art and, most alarmingly, endangered their own lives and the lives of others by blocking runways at airports and cars on busy roads. Two protesters glued themselves to a gantry sign on one of Berlin’s highways last year, obstructing emergency services’ response to a severe traffic accident. Though there have been calls in Germany for the Last Generation to be classified as a criminal organisation, the Berlin Senate Justice Department decided last week that there was no need for that.
