A member of a vegan environmental group who targeted dairy giant Arla in a protest that cost the firm an estimated £175,000 was handed unpaid work and a court bill of £295.
At the time of his ‘lock-on’ protest outside the company’s distribution centre near the A41 in August 2021, Extinction Rebellion protester Benjamin Buse was subject to a conditional discharge imposed after he covered the front of his local branch of Barclays in treacle.
Appearing before Oxford Magistrates’ Court on Thursday (June 8) to be sentenced for obstructing a person engaged in lawful activity, 37-year-old Buse claimed: “In this particular case it’s very clear that the company [Arla] is in breach of its obligations under the Paris Agreement [the 2015 UN climate agreement].”
District Judge Kamlesh Rana cut across him: “I’m not sentencing the company.”
Buse replied: “Part of the sentencing should reflect it was a protest about very serious issues about a company that is failing in its duty to the British public.”
Earlier, prosecutor Kate Jenkin told the court that Bristol university worker Buse was part of a group that staged a demonstration outside the Arla distribution centre, east of Aylesbury, on August 31, 2021.
The defendant was one of a number of protestors who fixed themselves down – or ‘locked on’ - beneath a rental van that had been parked across a roundabout on Samian Way, Aston Clinton, which led to the dairy company’s facility.
The protest began at around 5.30am but it was not until around 8.30pm, some 15 hours later that Buse was removed by specialist police officers.
The protest by group Animal Rebellion, which called on Arla to transition to plant-based production by 2025, led to significant disruption to the dairy conglomerate, its distributors and commuters.
By 7am, 90 minutes after the protest began, there was a tailback stretching three quarters of a mile down one lane of the eastbound A41 carriageway, the court heard.
Arla put the amount of revenue it lost as a result of the disruption at £175,000, while another company responsible for transporting liquid milk said it had cost them more than £1,250 in additional man hours and associated costs.
Buse was one of half a dozen Arla demonstrators originally acquitted by a Wycombe judge last year, only to see prosecutors successfully overturn the decision at the High Court.
The defendant, of Rodney Stoke, near Cheddar, then pleaded guilty in May to trespassing on land belonging to Arla Foods and obstructing lawful activity, a charge under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.
Representing himself from the dock of courtroom one at Oxford Magistrates’ Court on Thursday, Buse said: “We believed we were on the [public] highway and had we been on the highway the sentencing would be different and the defences available would be different also; we would have article 10 [freedom of expression] and article 11 [right to protest] defences available.”
Sentencing, District Judge Rana said she took into account that it was ‘on the face of it a peaceful protest’, but added that she could not ignore the disruption and cost caused to the firms and ‘local area’.
She imposed a 12 month community order with 150 hours of unpaid work and ordered Buse pay £295 in costs and surcharge.
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