A Bristol-based doctor has become Britain’s first working GP to be sent to prison for non-violent climate protest.

On Tuesday, Patrick Hart received a 12-month sentence at Chelmsford Crown Court after being found guilty of criminal damage. In August 2022, Hart used a hammer and chisel to crack fuel pump displays at a service station on the M25 as part of an action with Just Stop Oil.

Speaking to Novara Media before his sentencing, Hart said: “The climate catastrophe that is already upon us is fundamentally a threat to our health. We’ve seen that in Spain, but also in Sudan – all over the world there are evolving, horrifying threats to our health and our lives.” 

“I realised that the best thing I could do for the health of my patients was to try in any way I could to peacefully resist this great evil which is being inflicted on us by oil companies with complicity from governments, insurers, banks, lawyers, and all those who support them.”

Hart’s jailing will intensify an ongoing controversy within the medical world over whether doctors should be suspended for breaking the law as part of peaceful climate action, as the number of healthcare professionals arrested for climate protest in recent years in the UK rises to 135.

Hart, who has multiple convictions for direct action with a range of climate groups, will now face a tribunal convened by the General Medical Council (GMC) at which he could have his licence suspended or be struck off altogether. Hart’s treatment has been criticised by the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, who has said the GMC appears to be “subjecting Dr Hart to double punishment for his peaceful climate activism”.

Two retired GPs, Sarah Benn and Diana Warner, have so far been suspended by tribunals after receiving sentences for non-violent climate protest on the grounds that by breaking the law, they undermined trust in the medical profession. Doctors supporting Hart say there is no evidence for this, highlighting that high levels of trust in healthcare professionals only means that their engagement in civil disobedience helps press for urgent climate action. 

A GMC spokesperson previously told the media that while doctors have a right to express their opinions, “when doctors’ ­protesting results in law-breaking, they must understand that it is their actions in breaking the law, rather than their motivations, that will be under ­scrutiny”.

Hart’s supporters also point out that the GMC has itself acknowledged that taking regulatory action against doctors who have broken the law hasn’t always been the right thing to do. In February 2024, the body apologised to gay doctors who it struck off the medical register for homosexuality.

Professor Dame Carrie MacEwen, the GMC chair, said: “Homophobic laws and attitudes that were in place into the 1980s and beyond, caused personal and professional harm.

“We compounded that harm when we also took additional regulatory action against those who were on the medical register. In some cases that meant the end of a practitioner’s career. For this we are truly sorry.”

Hart’s belief that doctors have a duty to take peaceful climate action is supported by leaders in the medical profession.

In 2019, Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal The Lancet, wrote: “All health professionals have a duty and obligation to engage in all kinds of non-violent social protest to address the climate emergency” because it represents “the most existential crisis facing our communities in the world today”.

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