Five Greenpeace volunteers who occupied the top of a
British Airways passenger jet were today convicted at Uxbridge magistrates
court.
The campaigners pleaded guilty to being in a restricted
zone, boarding an aircraft and demonstrating in an airport. They were each given
an 18 month conditional discharge and will pay compensation to BA totalling
£5,700.
The five hit the headlines across the world in February
when they walked through an open door at Terminal 1 and occupied the fuselage of
the BA Airbus for two hours, hanging a banner from the tailfin reading: ‘CLIMATE EMERGENCY - NO 3rd RUNWAY'.
***Broadcast images and photos available on
request***
Anna
Jones, Sarah Shoraka, Paul Della-Rocca, Frank Hewetson and Jens
Loewe were protesting against Labour's plans to build a third
runway and sixth terminal at Heathrow. The plane they scaled had just arrived
for Manchester -
a journey covered by the train in just over two hours - and was refuelling for
another domestic flight. The five waited until all the passengers had
disembarked before walking through an open door and going ‘airside'.
A widely derided government consultation into Labour's
Heathrow proposals was completed the week of the Greenpeace occupation.
Ministers are expected to announce a decision on the proposed expansion later
this year.
One of the protesters, Anna
Jones, said: "Climate change can be beaten, but not by almost
doubling the size of the world's biggest international airport. That's why we
occupied the top of BA's Manchester to London flight. A huge
number of planes leave Heathrow every day destined for cities easily reachable
by train. If we invested in high speed rail instead of climate-wrecking runways
we could begin to reduce the environmental impact of Heathrow instead of
increasing it."
The most popular destination from Heathrow is Paris, with sixty flights
back and forth every day. Flights between Heathrow and locations easily
accessible by train - such as Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh,
Newcastle, Leeds/Bradford and Durham - total over 100,000
flights a year.
Flying is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas
emissions in the UK, doubling in the 1990s. According
to the government, flights from and within the UK account for 13% of the UK's climate impact because greenhouse gases create
more global warming when emitted at altitude.
British flyers already create far more carbon emissions
per head than those from any other country - nearly 40% higher than the second
placed country, Ireland, and more than twice as much
as Americans. The Tyndall climate research centre calculates that if aviation
expands as projected, Britain will have to totally
decarbonise the rest of its economy by 2050 to effectively tackle climate
change.
Sarah
Shoraka, another of the protesters, said: "The
fight against Heathrow expansion is only just beginning. This new runway cannot
and will not be built."
