14 DAY TRIAL // Yet another confirmation that the fight to protect our environment may sometimes be harsh comes from Greenpeace that has announced that 20 of its activists have been recently convicted and fined for scaling one of the world’s biggest oil rigs.
The activists who back in May 2011 took action to demand that UK company Cairn Energy publish its plan for dealing with an oil spill in the Arctic, have been found guilty of trespassing and fined.
According to Greenpeace, two of the activists were each fined 1,500 DKK (€200) each, while the other 18, who were also found guilty of breaking a security zone were fined 4,000 DKK (€550) each.
They all boarded the 53,000 tonne Leiv Eiriksson rig in the freezing waters west of Greenland, inspiring more than 100,000 people to sign a petition calling for the document to be released.
At that moment, Cairn argued that each day in which the rig is prevented from drilling costs the company up to $4 million (about €2.9 million).
They even asked for an injunction against Greenpeace that would have had to pay €2 million (about $2.7 million) in fines for every subsequent breach and every day the Leiv Eiriksson was prevented from operating.
The 20 activists who boarded the rig were from the USA, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Finland, Canada, Hungary and Sweden.
“We take full responsibility for our peaceful actions to protect the Arctic,” Greenpeace Campaigner Ben Ayliffe, one of the activists involved, stated following the sentence.
“Cairn Energy admits that a spill in this fragile and unique environment would be catastrophic; it is madness to allow such reckless companies to drill for more of the oil that is causing the region to melt in the first place. Our campaign to make the frozen north a no-go area for the oil industry will continue,” added Ayliffe.