Two Just Stop Oil activists have been jailed for pouring soup over Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers. Phoebe Plummer, 23, received a two-year jail term, while Anna Holland, 22, was handed 20 months. Hundreds have staged a protest outside Southwark Crown Court, with spokesperson Grahame Buss calling their sentencing a "miscarriage of justice". Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00I'm deeply shocked. I am in shock. I'm feeling very emotional about this.
00:06I think the sentencing is entirely inappropriate
00:11for relatively minor criminal damage.
00:15Effectively, he sentenced them for something they didn't do,
00:18which seems to me to be a miscarriage of justice.
00:21He sentenced them for the possibility that they might have damaged
00:25the painting itself when the painting wasn't damaged
00:28and they took considerable care to ensure that that wouldn't happen.
00:31So the jury, as I understand it,
00:34the conviction was for the damage of the frame, the actual damage.
00:38And so he seems to have ignored that
00:40and assumed that the damage was to the picture.
00:43So this is... I hesitate to say this, but it's true.
00:47This seems to me to be a political conviction.
00:51No-one should go to prison for a non-violent act. No-one.
00:56The courts are massively overflowing with people.
00:58We're having to let out rapists so that we can put other people in.
01:02Who are we putting in their place?
01:04We're putting in two young women whose only concern is for other people.
01:09This is not justice.
01:12This is a vindictive man trying to silence activists,
01:16not just climate activists, all activists in the UK,
01:19so that we cannot complain about these horrible situations that we're in,
01:23both from the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis.
01:26We are facing mass starvation like we've never seen before.
01:30That's just around the corner.
01:32We've seen a taste of the floods and of the heat waves that have come to the UK,
01:36and we've seen a taste of the droughts and the wildfires around the world.
01:40It's time for that to end.
01:42We need to stop all oil and gas by 2030,
01:45treat this as the emergency that it is,
01:47and get on with the job.
01:49It's horrible.
01:50No one deserves to go to prison for this.
01:53No one.
01:55But I know that if they were here now,
01:57they would say,
01:59do not worry about me in prison.
02:01They would say,
02:03we need to get on and do more actions like this.
02:06We are not victims.
02:08We are a part of trying to make change,
02:11and we all need to pressure our government to make change.
02:14Otherwise, we're all going to be suffering.