When people think of CCA, they often think of those taking climate action. But there’s many different roles needed, both protest focussed and behind the scenes. Sue Hampton was doing a court support role last week. The role does what it says on the tin – Sue has been present in court, supporting people who are on trial for climate protest. Below she explains how she found this role, including the emotional journey she went on and the meaning she drew from it.

If you are interested in doing a support role in CCA, email christianclimateaction@gmail.com

In courtrooms faced by friends, I’ve observed, strained to hear and occasionally been bored witless, but offered a familiar face in the public gallery. Until recently, however, I had never ‘officially’ put myself down on a rota for court support.

What does court support involve? Well, joining a Climate Action Support Pathway Signal group, reading some brief guidelines, providing hugs and perhaps being willing to take notes or bring food to share. How much it’s possible to interact with the defendants depends on whether they arrive on the day as a free person (if tagged) or are under escort from a prison.

I have found the experience emotional and surreal. Firstly, there’s the upside down and back to front dystopia of it all: the inversion of justice – and vocabulary – which is hard to credit. Nonviolent protesters act in line with scientific consensus reached over five decades, because our leaders won’t. We act with the explicit approval of climate change experts increasingly driven beyond academia into their own activism. Criminalisation of truth tellers is not rational. And it seems to me, wondering what jurors see, transparently and blindingly obvious that those in the dock are good people motivated by love and conscience: principled, compassionate and very brave.

Then there’s the slow, dull, outdated court process conducted largely with the casualness of business as usual. As if those lived, or fatal, experiences of the climate crisis from around the world count for nothing. No one employed in the courtroom gives a Dickensian fig about ecological collapse and the coat of arms on the wall will ward off fascism. For the prosecution and often for the judge, the familiarity IS contempt. It’s a game with preposterously high stakes and loaded dice, and one way to prevent jurors from exercising head and heart is to disengage them by attrition.

Every climate trial used to make me cry. Now, the scientific evidence that motivates protesters isn’t always admissible. A woman who poisoned her violently abusive husband can explain why she did this; climate activists may not be allowed. That depends on the judge, but in any case juries are never advised that the law offers them the absolute right to acquit on grounds of conscience.

So a courtroom may have no more comfort to offer those on trial than hugs from court support, and the opportunity to face proceedings alongside others, in what Rev Sue Parfitt calls “the beloved community”. Last week, when upholding defendants I know a little at best, I felt the power of that beloved community – of that very real love.

The love, of course, is fed by profound shared world-grief. My love, alongside gratitude and respect, is fearful for those making the sacrifice, because it’s costly. It’s fearful that it won’t be enough to effect change, and that hope is no longer realistic. Yet I feel the consoling relief of being together as we honour the truth governments won’t serve. Stepping out of the superficial day-to-day world that can seem so normal, I feel again a deep, sustaining sense of meaning.