Having Your Day in Court

Structuring Difference: Criminal Justice Systems and Legal and Judicial Opportunity

The literature on political opportunity structures counts the independence of the judicial system as a key variable in its determination of state capacity (Meyer & Minkoff, 2004; Tarrow, 1998); states that have an independent judiciary and where there is extensive legal codification offer greater checks and balances on executive power. Consequently—and bearing in mind that this is but one variable within a complex series—challenging groups may enjoy greater opportunities for effective opposition to governmental policies, projects, or programs and may further be reasonably expected to adopt more moderate forms of protest. However, where states do not have a fully independent judiciary or extensive legal codification, opposition movements have fewer systemic means for opposition or redress. Where effective opportunities are lacking, social movements can be expected to adopt more conflictual forms of protest and develop dissent on specific issues into more general critiques of the political system (Duyvendak, 1995; Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, & Giugni, 1992).

The judiciary is thus typically associated in political opportunity analyses with the strength or effectiveness of policy implementation (Kitschelt, 1986, pp. 63-65). Discussion of potential systemic openness and exclusion focuses on the legal instruments available to either the state (such as injunctions) or protesters (such as the codification of rights or the development of, say, environmental law; see, e.g., Dryzek, Downes, Hunold, & Schlosberg, 2003, pp. 30-34, 50-54). Legal and judicial systems are thus important to our conception of movement mobilization, although they have received relatively little sustained attention in this context.

Where analysis has examined the relationships between social movements and the law, the predominant focus has been on “legal mobilization,” where “law provides both normative principles and strategic resources for the conduct of social struggle [and] is mobilized when a desire or want is translated into an assertion of right or lawful claim” (McCann, 2004, p. 508). A series of collections brought together by Sarat and Scheingold (1998, 2005b, 2006) has examined the role of cause lawyers in such mobilizations, stressing not only their advocacy but also their ideological contribution, helping movements “define the realm of the possible” (Sarat & Scheingold, 2005a, p. 10). Stressing a bottom-up, “support-structure explanation” for the “rights revolution” of increased judicial attention to and support for individual rights that has taken place in the United States over the past 50 years, Epp (1998) also underlines the key role played by rights-advocacy lawyers in bringing this about, in conjunction with the development of movement organizations articulating rights claims.

Within this tradition of legal mobilization, a number of commentators have recently argued that the concept of legal opportunity structure should be seen as distinct from political opportunity structure and can provide a more thorough understanding of the role of legal strategies in protest (Hilson, 2002, 2009). For Andersen (2006), legal and political opportunity are differentiated by framing operations: Movements engaged in litigation are constrained in their interpretive schema, such that they “must articulate their claims so that they fall within the categories previously established by an amalgam of constitutional, statutory, administrative, common, and case law,” which in turn “shape the progress and outcome of movement claims in important ways” (p. 12).

The contributions of the legal mobilization literature to our understanding of the interplay between social movements and the law are important ones. However, the predominant focus here is on litigation as an offensive tactic. Analyses typically focus on the furtherance of rights-based claims making, particularly in the context of judicial review and constitutional courts (e.g., Andersen, 2006; Barclay, Bernstein, & Marshall, 2009; Smith, 2005; Vanhala, 2009a, 2009b; Wilson & Cordero, 2006); there is a focus on North America. Explicitly cross-national comparative analysis is rare (Epp, 1998, being an exception). Explanations of activist tactics within contrasting judicial traditions and systems has been curiously overlooked, with systemic differences typically situated at the macro level, such as between liberal and authoritarian regimes (e.g., Sarat & Scheingold, 1998).

Our article proposes two developments of this literature, therefore: We compare movement activism in the specific context of contrasting judicial systems, and we focus on cases where social movement actors come before the courts not for reasons of litigation but rather for those of prosecution, for their involvement in direct action. This question seems to us to be all the more important because, as Barkan (2006) points out, the prosecutions and trials of political activists are “normal events in the life cycle of many protest movements” (p. 183). Yet—Barkan aside—prosecutions for collective action have rarely been investigated within the social movement literature, whereas the tactical, discursive, and ethical problems and possibilities posed by defenses against prosecution entail a different set of opportunities from those of “legal opportunity,” for two reasons.

First, this is because prosecution and litigation bring movement actors into different cultural and legal arenas. Second, this is because it is important to separate judicial from legal opportunities in movement terms. Vanhala (2009a, pp. 741, 752) includes acts of civil disobedience in her discussion of litigation strategies (“reactive litigation”) but also recognizes the division of labor within social movement campaigns, with some groups adopting direct action and others lobbying or litigation strategies. As the argument we develop here will suggest, it is important not to reduce direct action a priori to a form of civil disobedience, a concern with rights, or a desire to force a change in the law. It is also important to underline that direct action and litigation imply different skill sets, mobilizing frameworks, resources, and institutional relationships. Indeed, as Ollitrault (2008) underlines with respect to the French environmental movement, the development of legal strategies by social movement actors implies both their progressive institutionalization and the existence of a membership with specialized resources. In contrast, actions that result in prosecution in the courts require (at least a priori) few specialized resources and are open to mass collective participation. To borrow Zirakzadeh’s (2006, p. 5) phrase, participants involved in disruptive action walk on a different side of the legal fence from those involved in litigation.

Comparing France and the United Kingdom is thus intriguing given the very different judicial systems and cultures that prevail in these two countries. Of course, there are some similarities between the English and French systems that are particularly relevant to direct action: In both countries, activists arrested for the same offence are tried collectively and have the option of mounting a “lawful excuse” defense (under the 1971 Criminal Damage Act in England and Wales, or by invoking an état de nécessité under article 122-7 of the penal code in France). Activists can therefore argue (as crop trashers have in both countries) that a given act of law breaking was committed to stop a greater one; they may also call witnesses to contextualize and substantiate their defense. Beyond these important commonalities, however, there are significant structural differences between the two systems.

The first relates to the operation of juries. The common law tradition asserts individual freedoms over state prerogatives: The principle of jury trial delegates control over adjudication to the “lay judges” of juries (La Porta, López de Silanes, Pop-Eleches, & Shleifer, 2002, p. 8). In England, this option is open to activists brought before crown courts, though not for minor criminal offences, which are heard without a jury in magistrates’ courts (where criminal damage is involved, the figure of £5,000 acts as a threshold; jury trials are only possible only where damage is estimated to be above this figure). In France, juries operate only in the assize courts (cours d’assises), which deal with major criminal cases (“crimes,” defined by prospective sentences of at least 10 years in prison). Less serious offences (“délits”) are held in tribunaux correctionnels before a magistrate, normally accompanied by two assessors. For anti-GMO activists prosecuted in France, therefore, there is effectively no option of a jury trial; verdicts are handed down by magistrates. A second important distinction concerns the importance of precedent. Case law, or the body of law as derived from the decisions and practices of the courts, is the cornerstone of the English common law system (Simpson, 1973, p. 94; Wesley-Smith, 1994, p. 8), which thus grants considerable discretion and independence to judges (though in routine criminal cases, English courts are bound by precedent from higher courts). In contrast, the civil law tradition conceives law as a system of rules, the imposition of statute (La Porta et al., 2002, p. 9). As a result, jurisprudential reasoning plays a minor role only in French civil law; formally, French judges enjoy neither significant levels of freedom from political interference nor flexibility and power to shape the law through their decisions. Judicial independence in France remains frequently compromised by explicit government intervention in the terms of prosecution and the application of sentences (e.g., there is, indeed, substantial evidence of direct ministerial intervention in both policing and judicial decisions on anti-GMO activists).

Scotland provides an intermediate case. It has a mixed legal system: Its post-Renaissance foundations are based, like the French civil law tradition, on Roman law; but, in contrast to the Napoleonic codification of civil law at the heart of the French tradition, Scots civil and criminal law remain uncodified and, following the 1707 Act of Union with England and the Napoleonic Wars a century later, its subsequent development has been highly influenced by the English legal tradition (Tetley, 1999; Walker, 2001). For our purposes, the mixed nature of the Scottish system provides a control for our investigation of the influence of criminal justice systems and activist ideas on tactical choice. Although anti-GMO activists in Scotland belonged to the same networks as those in England and Wales and are thus part of the same national anti-GMO movement, the court procedure in criminal cases differs in Scotland from that in England and Wales, and in key respects is structurally similar to the French procedure: jury trials are available in Scotland only for serious crimes (“solemn procedure”), whereas less serious crimes (those for which the maximum penalties are 12 months in prison and a £10,000 fine), such as crop trashing, are judged either by a magistrate or justice of the peace sitting alone, or by three justices of the peace sitting together (“summary procedure”). Comparison with the tactical choices of Scottish activists should therefore enable us to control our findings from the English and French cases.

What then can we expect the effect of these structural and operational differences to be on the conduct of illegal direct action against GMOs in Scotland, France, and England? We suggest that it produces a first set of two hypotheses concerning what we might term a judicial opportunity structure:

Comparing Anti-GMO Movements

Crop trashing has taken place in several European countries, but to date by far the most sustained campaigns have been in the United Kingdom and France. Since 1997 in both countries, activists have carried out numerous actions against open field trials of GM crops, authorized on a pluriannual basis by the respective bioscientific regulatory authorities of each state and managed by public research institutes and/or biotechnology multinationals (such as Aventis [later Bayer], Monsanto, Pioneer, BASF, Limagrain, Syngenta). In France, activists have also targeted plantations of Monsanto MON810 corn, as commercial cultivation—previously negligible—increased dramatically between 2005 and 2007. Since the end of the main crop trials in the United Kingdom in 2003 and an effective moratorium on GM crops in France since 2008, there has only been sporadic action, as the cultivation of GM crops has been in abeyance in both countries (though there is considerable direct action in France against some sunflower strains considered by activists to be “second-generation” GMOs).

Direct action against GM crops in the United Kingdom and France was only one part of a broader campaign in which NGOs, independent scientists, and consumer groups lobbied government, biotech corporations, and food producers and engaged in public information campaigns. This broad anti-GMO movement developed apace within the EU once GM soy beans began to arrive in European ports in 1996 (Ansell, Rahsaan, & Sicurelli, 2006; Schurman & Munro, 2009). Greenpeace was a leading and early actor in the anti-GMO campaigns across Europe, organizing blockades at ports including Liverpool and Saint-Nazaire in 1996 and coordinating transnational action at EU level (Ansell et al., 2006; Purdue, 2000). Greenpeace UK carried out a high-profile crop trash at Lyng in Norfolk in 1999, which along with the subsequent acquittal of the 28 participants by juries in two trials gained more coverage than any other single crop trash in the United Kingdom. But this was a one-off, media-oriented action, and although Greenpeace remained a vital part of national and European lobby-based campaigns, in the United Kingdom and France other groups emerged that acted independently of it, using sabotage (including crop trashing) as a principal tactic. It is these groups that are the subject of this study.

In France, the leading role has been played by the leftist peasant farmers’ union La Confédération paysanne (CP), which has undertaken direct action against GM crops since 1997 and whose leading activists have become the public face of the campaign (particularly José Bové, now a Europe-Ecologie member of the European Parliament). In 2003, faced with the end of a five-year EU moratorium on GM crops, the CP helped launch the Faucheurs volontaires (FV) “civic disobedience” campaign of overt, public crop trashing, alongside a series of citizen, agricultural, and environmental organizations—including Greenpeace France, France Nature Environnement, the organic farmers’ union Fédération nationale d’agriculture biologique, alter-globalization organization ATTAC, and Les Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth); some 7,000 individual activists have formally registered as Faucheurs, signing a written undertaking (discussed in more detail in the third section). Organizationally, although mindful of local autonomy and eschewing an overtly pyramidal structure, the FV campaign provides recognized national leaders, a coordinated national structure and disciplined modus operandi for activism, effective legal support for arrested activists, and mediation (with activists, organizations, police, court officials, print and broadcast media, political parties, state bureaucracy, government; Hayes, 2007). The FV campaign was, in Bové’s words, explicitly devised so that “it wasn’t just peasant farmers who undertook actions,” following the initial period when the CP “essentially acted as a syndicalized organization.” ¹ It was also explicitly devised as a public campaign rather than an organization to protect its member organizations financially; it is not registered, for example, as an association under French law. Prior to the FV campaign, organizations initiating actions were legally liable for compensation claims; the CP in particular was vulnerable to bankruptcy. In the FV campaign, however, activists could now only be individually liable, given the FV’s lack of legal status.

In the United Kingdom, the organization of direct action against GM crops was much less coordinated than in France, with no national membership organization and no publicly identifiable leaders. Crop trashing was principally carried out by informal locally based groups of radical environmental activists who had developed direct action techniques in campaigns against the Conservative government’s roads and airport expansion programs in the mid-1990s (Thomas, 2001; Wall, 2000). By the time that GM crops became a significant issue around 1998, they already had substantial experience of occupying sites, damaging property, and committing illegal action (Doherty et al., 2007; Plows, Wall, & Doherty, 2004; Seel, Paterson, & Doherty, 2000). The relative success of these actions reinforced their belief that illegal and disruptive protest action could be effective and win significant public support. These activists were linked through a loose network of local groups known as Earth First! (EF!). EF! had no formal membership and no bureaucratic structure or officeholders, held only occasional national strategy gatherings, and, in contrast to the FV, had no charter defining legitimate actions. Nominally distinct groups such as Reclaim the Streets, Corporate Watch, and genetiX snowball (gXs) overlapped with EF! (Wall, 2000) as part of the same “movement community” (Meyer & Staggenborg, 2007); activists from all of these groups took part in the same protests and meetings, acting as individuals rather than as representatives of separate groups. They carried out both public and covert crop trashing and other actions against biotech corporations and the food industry, including office occupations and disruptive protests inside supermarkets and against their distribution networks. In public actions they would often be acting alongside a broader range of actors, including activists from more mainstream green NGOs, local residents, and farmers campaigning against a particular GM crop trial site.

There are a number of differences therefore in the organizations and movement traditions underpinning each campaign. Most significant for our study, there were also fundamental differences in how the courts dealt with those arrested and charged for crop trashing. The much publicized Greenpeace UK acquittals were part of a broader pattern in England where over the previous 10 years “prosecutions of protesters against new roads and nuclear, chemical and arms trade companies collapsed after defendants argued that they had lawful excuse, had acted according to their consciences and that they were trying to prevent a greater crime.” ² In 2000–2001 the Crown Prosecution Service lost three major trials against crop trashers, and this trend has carried on since the scaling down of anti-GMO activism: Juries have acquitted Greenpeace climate change activists at Maidstone crown court in 2008 (for trespass at E.ON’s Kingsnorth coal power station), peace campaigners at Bristol crown court in 2007 (for damaging B-52 bombers at Fairford airbase prior to the Iraq war), and at Brighton crown court in 2010 (for breaking into and damaging the premises of EDO, a defense equipment manufacturer that had supplied the Israeli army).

Only one jury trial of crop trashers produced a conviction (in 2003, for an action in 2001); the two activists found guilty received fines. This contrasts both with the Greenpeace case discussed above and the acquittal of two activists at Worcester in November 2001 as the jury accepted their lawful excuse defense. ³ But even where defendants were found guilty, they received lenient sentences. In December 2000, five activists were found guilty of pulling up GM oilseed rape at a research farm in County Durham in a nonjury trial; the judge pronounced a conditional discharge, and the activists were not ordered to pay compensation to either the biotech company (Aventis CropScience) or the farmer. In a written judgment, Judge Firth praised their motives, saying that any reasonable person would have pulled up more trial sites, and sooner. ⁴ In June 2001, charges of aggravated trespass were dropped against seven activists who had destroyed GM crops near Sherborne in Dorset; the same month, on procedural grounds, a district judge acquitted 11 activists of criminal damage for the destruction of an Aventis farm-scale trial near Wivenhoe in Essex. ⁵ In addition, gXs activists successfully appealed against conviction for a crop trash in Cambridge, with the judge deciding that it had been wrong to charge them with aggravated trespass (a public order offence tried before magistrates), which would have meant that they had no right to make a public interest defense. ⁶ In several further cases, charges were dropped, even when the evidence of crop trashing was clear (Thomas, 2001, pp. 342-343). As an activist newsletter reported, “The Crown became somewhat reluctant to press for damages of over £5000 because this gives activists the right to ask for a trial by jury rather than a magistrate.” ⁷ Prosecutors would claim that there had been hardly any damage; campaigners would claim that they had in fact caused plenty to try to get a jury trial.

In France, the story is somewhat different. Between the first trial, at Agen in February 1998, and the most recent, at Poitiers in January 2012, courts in a further 21 different towns have heard a further 26 prosecutions for crop destruction, with 13 verdicts taken to appeal. Activists have consistently pleaded a “necessity” defense, arguing that their action was designed to stop greater harm and (since September 2005 in particular) calling expert witnesses, such as molecular biologists Jacques Testart and Christian Vélot, to challenge the government–industry position on the safety of GM crops. “Since we cannot have a public debate, we’ll transform the courts into a debating chamber on GMOs,” argued Bové. ⁸ In trials at Orléans in December 2005 and Versailles in January 2006, where the presiding magistrates were (according to molecular biologist Claude Seureau, who acted as an expert witness for the defense in these and two other trials) particularly interested in encouraging scientific debate within the courtroom, magistrates acquitted activists on similar grounds to those put forward in English jury verdicts, agreeing that the actions of the defendants were “urgent and necessary,” citing the risk of cross-contamination. ⁹ For the Faucheurs campaign, these verdicts constituted “a right to destroy for each citizen, and an obligation to prohibit for the State.” ¹⁰ In June 2008, at Chartres, 58 activists were acquitted, the court again agreeing with the defendants that they had acted legitimately out of necessity.

Yet these have proven to be exceptional cases. All three of these verdicts were overturned on appeal: 48 of the 49 defendants acquitted at Orléans subsequently received suspended prison sentences of 2 months, with the 49th sentenced to 2 months in jail; the nine activists acquitted at Versailles, all members of the CP, were sentenced to 3 months, suspended; all 58 acquitted at Chartres received 3-month suspended sentences plus fines of €1,000, with the fine increased for the five who were recidivists. More fundamentally, acquittals were the exception rather than the rule: Activists have otherwise consistently received short suspended prison sentences and relatively small fines, and sometimes been ordered to pay substantial damages (such as the €100,000 imposed by the Toulouse criminal court in November 2005 on eight movement leaders). The range of sentences imposed on 41 activists at Toulouse in September 2008 is perhaps typical: heavy fines for five recidivist activists (including Bové) and suspended sentences of 1 or 2 months for the remaining activists.

A clear pattern therefore emerges from the trial records. Activists have repeatedly been convicted in France and repeatedly been acquitted, or had their charges dropped, in England. In France, compensation claims from biotechnology companies have sometimes resulted in the award of substantial damages, to be paid by activists; on no occasion has this been the case in England, where judges have conspicuously rejected such claims on several occasions. In France, even if sentences have frequently been more lenient than demanded by state prosecutors, they have also been consistently heavier than on the rare occasions where activists have been found guilty in England.

What about the Scottish cases? The activists prosecuted in Scotland belonged to the same groups as in England and carried out their actions in much the same ways—a mix of covert action by EF! and related groups, whereas other groups of local campaigners (typically working with experienced green activists) took public actions that often led to arrest. As noted, the criminal justice system in Scotland does not allow activists the same opportunities for jury trial as in England; in Scotland, magistrates have thus always tried crop trashers. Between July 2002 and March 2003, separate groups of Scottish activists were convicted of anti-GMO crop trashing on six occasions. ¹¹ Though fines have been small in Scotland, the evidence here seems to bear out the hypothesis that there are structural differences in outcomes between criminal justice systems. Indeed, one married couple experienced these differences firsthand when they undertook separate actions in Scotland and England: Though her husband had been acquitted for his avowed participation in the Greenpeace action in Norfolk, Helena Beveridge was convicted by Aberdeen Sheriff’s court in May 2002 for causing an estimated £4,000 worth of damage to a GMO crop trial 1 year before. As she commented, “I think it is bizarre that my husband, Alastair, can do the exact same thing with Greenpeace activists in Norwich and be acquitted, yet I am guilty.” ¹² An activist website made the point: “Yes, but Alistair had a jury!” ¹³

What then of our hypotheses about a judicial opportunity structure? The evidence from our comparison of direct action prosecutions in the United Kingdom and France tends to confirm the first of our hypotheses: The structural differences between criminal justice systems have a significant impact on the prosecution outcomes of activists tried for nonviolent direct action. Yet what of the second hypothesis—that activists will make tactical choices that reflect these differential success chances? Here, the evidence is intriguing. We might expect to see three related dynamics: first, that we would find similar tactics in France and Scotland; second, that these would be markedly different from those we would find in England; third, that—given the likelihood of conviction in France and Scotland and acquittal in England—activists in England would adopt more open and public tactics and activists in Scotland and France more covert tactics. However, when we compare the tactical choices of the British and French direct action campaigns against GMOs, Hypothesis 2 is not supported. In fact, we discover something far more interesting than a purely structural reading based on comparing judicial systems would provide:

Crucially, then, the difference in judicial systems in different parts of the United Kingdom has not produced difference in tactical choice, whereas the broad similarity of these institutional arrangements in France and Scotland has not produced similarity of tactical choice. The systemic properties of the judicial system do not seem to influence the likelihood that activists will undertake covert action: Whether in favorable or unfavorable systems, British activists behave in the same way; unfavorable systems (France, Scotland) produce divergent (and counterintuitive) activist tactical choices. How might we explain this? For an explanation, we turn to the ideas of activists, as reflected in and through their internal debates.

Constructing Accountability

In each movement, arguments over effectiveness and accountability are fundamental and revealing. As we shall see, not all those involved in the direct action networks in either country agreed on the tactics adopted. In Britain, there was a heated argument between those who favored covert nocturnal sabotage with the aim of destroying as much of the crop as possible and those committed to what they called “accountable actions” involving symbolic amounts of destruction. This latter tactic was associated with gXs, formed in 1998; some of its founders had been active in campaigns against nuclear weapons and the arms trade since the 1980s and later became involved in EF! campaigns in the 1990s (Wall, 2000). One prominent activist, Angie Zelter, was also one of the four women who had stood trial for “disarming” a Hawk jet aircraft with hammers at BAE’s Warton factory in January 1996; at Liverpool crown court, they explained their action as necessary because this type of aircraft had been sold to the Indonesian Air Force and used to kill civilians in East Timor. The jury, accepting that this constituted “reasonable grounds,” acquitted them by majority verdict.

There was significant overlap between 1990s environmental direct action networks and peace and antimilitarist activists, for whom the highpoint of “nonviolent direct action” had been the peace camps and protests against the deployment of cruise missiles across Western Europe in 1983. Like most Western European countries (but unlike France), there was a mass peace movement in Britain that regularly mobilized hundreds of thousands of activists between 1980 and 1987. gXs revived a peace movement repertoire of the mid-1980s, where hundreds of activists were arrested in a “snowball” of protests that grew progressively larger; gXs aimed to encourage enough people to commit to taking action against GM crop trials to make the government institute a 5-year moratorium on all testing and cultivation. The methods chosen were nonconfrontational and public: Protesters informed the farmers and police in advance that they would be taking action (although not necessarily when), were limited to damaging 100 plants each, acted only in daylight, and were prepared to be arrested (gXs, 1999, 5.6). One of the gXs founders, Rowan Tilly, described this form of action as “accountable”:

Accountability is about pro-actively and deliberately telling people about yourself, what action you have taken and why you have done it. Being accountable means taking action and then explaining what has already happened and your part in it. (Tilly, 1998)

Accountability was thus defined as the moral accountability of an individual to their conscience. It therefore did not entail an acceptance of the legitimacy of the state or legal system, or of the right of the police and courts to arrest and punish them, as its founders made clear in debates with others from the EF! movement, who accused them of being reformist (Leeds Earth First!, 1998).

In France, the FV campaign is also premised on accountability. However, this is a very different, collective, republican construction of accountability and explicitly accepts the right of the state to judge activists for their actions. The March 2004 Charte des Faucheurs volontaires emphasizes the “democratic,” “responsible,” and “collective” nature of “citizen action,” actively discouraging individual and covert action, or the use of cutting tools; it is recommended that local collectives “present themselves publicly in order to affirm the citizen character of this legitimate resistance and to attract other volunteers and support.” Activists should carry an identity card in case of arrest (FV, 2004). Actions are signaled in advance to the media, carried out in broad daylight, à visage découvert (unmasked and openly); faced with the choices of state prosecutors to prosecute only a handful of activists (often movement leaders), activists have frequently denounced themselves to the gendarmerie, provided lists of those involved, developed tactics under arrest to bring about collective prosecution, and, when all else fails, declared themselves comparants volontaires (voluntary defendants). In July 2004, when 9 activists were arrested for crop destruction at Menville, a further 222 formally declared themselves equally responsible, whereas after the arrest of 6 activists at Marsat the following month, 167 more turned themselves in. Though self-denunciation was formally rejected by the instruction of justice minister Dominique Perben (Hayes, 2006, 2007), the tactics have generally been successful: Providing lists of participants has produced numerous mass trials, including (alongside the 58 activists tried in Chartres in June 2008, mentioned above) 86 activists in Marmande in October 2010 and 60 activists in Colmar in September 2011. It is notable that gXs, the British group that seems tactically closest to the FV, explicitly rejected the idea of self-denunciation because although they did not seek to evade arrest, neither was arrest the aim of the action.

For the FV, accountability before the law has an ethical dimension: Submission to arrest is a demonstration of the campaign’s commitment to the primacy of the public order. To join the campaign, activists must sign a document accepting formal responsibility for their actions. For Bové,

Even if we don’t know each participant in our civil disobedience actions individually, those who are there have undertaken in writing to accept full responsibility for their action. I place great belief in this written engagement, which we require of everyone. It is a sort of citizen’s oath, a charter which creates a respect for the collective. It produces a great sense of responsibility. ¹⁴

The illegality of crop destruction is contrasted with the government’s alleged denial of democratic consultation and the insufficiency of the national and European regulatory frameworks. To accept formal accountability for illegal actions is thus an instrumental as well as ethical act, ensuring continued mediatization, public visibility, and political pressure and opening an institutional space to challenge public policy. But it is also a symbolic mobilization of the national-cultural repertoire of contention: Public action, arrest, trial, and sanction create a public space for the enactment of democratic entitlement and demonstrate the Republican nature of the campaign’s citizens’ engagement. The invocation of Republican action is explicit: For example, former CP spokesman Jean-Émile Sanchez, on trial in Orléans in May 2006, justified his action in the following terms:

Faucheurs oppose the patenting of living beings by multinational companies, that’s all. As far as concerns the supposed violence of the action, let’s not forget that our Constitution is the result of collective violence committed at the Bastille on 14 July 1789. ¹⁵

Specifically French, these discourses found no echo in Britain. In contrast, for both gXs and the wider crop trashing networks, the question of the legitimacy of the court was left to the activist to decide, with no effort to establish a collective view. Sanction had a purely tactical value: gXs argued that by accepting arrest they could exploit the courts as a public arena to challenge injustice. This meant being prepared to engage in legal battles, which seemed a distraction to others. For instance, following the first gXs crop trash in July 1998, Monsanto took out an injunction against gXs to prevent it damaging further crop trials; an activist critical of gXs commented,

Anyway at the end of the day Snowball did some small actions, and more and more people got injuncted, and they weren’t the kinds of people who need to get injuncted, get their houses taken off them—it’s different for us. They got embroiled in these court cases, they only pulled up a very small number of crops, they scared off the people they were trying to get involved, and it took maybe 10 activists over a year of very focused work to pull up a couple of hundred crops whereas covertly doing it the same number of activists could have pulled up thousands of crops. ¹⁶

gXs undertook actions only in 1998–1999, disbanding in 2001, once its final court case was complete. Nevertheless, its activists continued crop trashing as individuals, joining several local anti-GMO groups in “accountable” actions broadly in line with the guidelines suggested in the gXs handbook (gXs, 1999). But both the “accountable” tactics of gXs and the idea of an organization with rules were rejected by most of those who had been most active in environmental direct action against roads. The vast majority of crop trashes reported in the newsletter Genetix Update were from anonymous groups. Covert methods were favored because the very low risk of arrest allowed those who could not risk charges to take part more easily, a point stressed in a field manual for covert crop trashers (Anonymous, n.d.). Insofar as the measures of success were preventing the crop from cross-pollinating and undermining the crop trials, it was argued that covert action was simply more effective because more plants could be destroyed (see the quotation above). These activists also argued that gXs was elitist because only the able-bodied and those without mortgages and families would be prepared to accept arrest and trial (Leeds Earth First!, 1998). Importantly, gXs was also challenged on ideological grounds:

Covert action questions the legitimacy of the legal system’s handing out punishment—surely a necessary question to ask of an institution which has proved time and time again that its priorities are not to end injustice nor to stop ecological degradation. While the odds are stacked against us and the system does not share our interests, covert action has a part to play in an effective strategy. ¹⁷

This critique was also voiced in activist debates over tactics, such as at the EF! gathering in 1998, ¹⁸ and in interviews:

If we’re gonna do criminal damage to my mind there are times and places to be accountable. . . .

And I don’t think being accountable to corporations is the right way to go about things. . . . I think you have to be very careful of working with the media and working assuming that the judicial system, if you’re honest and doing the right thing, will back you up. ¹⁹

In France, too, the campaign’s emphasis on “civic disobedience” has not been without challenge from within activist networks. First, there are significant differences in the conceptualization of direct action between the FV campaign and Greenpeace France, which (at an organizational level) rejects mass collective crop destruction in favor of professionalized and media-oriented actions. Second, the FV campaign itself was subsequent to divergences between two of the initial leaders, Bové and René Riesel, who split bitterly in 1999 over the legitimacy of the state to take public policy decisions over biotechnology. Riesel, perhaps best described politically as an anarcho-situationist, remains highly critical of “citizen” politics, arguing that organizations such as the CP are still wedded to a concept of an all-encompassing state that has little to say about the alienating effects of “the system.” ²⁰ He thus rejects the FV campaign’s acceptance of the use of GMOs in medical research in the laboratory and of any strategy that sees the state as a potential regulatory ally. At local level, there were frequent covert actions at both the start of the decade, and in 2006–2007 in particular, as some activists became frustrated with the openness of the campaign (as activists were regularly greeted at preannounced crop trashes by gendarmes and pro-GMO farmers). One group published a nocturnal crop trash charter in summer 2007, ²¹ extolling autonomy and anonymity and rejecting collective decision making and submission to arrest, arguing that covert action by a “self-managing collective” is more effective than (what it perceived to be) a “bureaucratic and hierarchical” national organization. ²²

In both countries, therefore, there were divisions over tactics and the ideological principles that justified them. Yet although in the United Kingdom the argument essentially took place within an anarchistic network about what forms of protest were consistent with their shared critique of the state, in France the argument essentially took place among groups with contrasting critiques of the state. In the United Kingdom, although public symbolic actions by Greenpeace, gXs, and others received considerable media coverage, the majority of actions were covert and unclaimed; in France, the movement crystallized around public acts of civil disobedience.

Conclusions

What then does our evidence tell us? First, it tells us that systemic structural differences are crucial to understanding the differential prosecution outcomes for social movement actors. Moreover, systemic differences are stable, predictable, and consistent; we believe, therefore, that the concept of a judicial opportunity structure can be a valid and useful one for understanding the trajectories and outcomes of direct action campaigns in particular and is analytically distinct from the litigation-focused concept of “legal opportunity structure.” Second, however, our evidence tells us that movement tactical choices cannot simply be read off from these systemic properties; in the case of the anti-GMO campaigns in the three countries studied, we see activist tactics that are themselves consistent but are not consistent with the expectations derived from the criminal justice systems.

There are three reasons why this might be: (a) activists are unaware of the organization of the criminal justice system; (b) they are aware of it, but misperceive how it operates; or (c) they perceive it correctly, but their crop-trashing tactics are not predetermined by it. As should be evident from our discussion, we are reasonably confident that neither (a) nor (b) is valid here; indeed, at the FV annual meeting in 2011, ²³ there was sustained collective discussion of the fine detail of arrest and trial, including discussion of the precise form of words best used in custody to maximize the chances of producing a collective prosecution (thus recognizing how the criminal justice system operates) coupled with continued debate over the effectiveness of prosecutions in achieving movement goals (thus relating outcomes to tactical choice). ²⁴ The evidence from both our cases overwhelmingly supports (c) and specifically that debates over ideas within movements are decisive in explaining tactical choice. As we have seen, most British activists spurned the openings potentially provided by acquittals and the reluctance of judges to impose more than token penalties, whereas French activists instrumentalized court cases as occasions to reinforce collective identity and maintain political pressure. The reasons explaining tactical choice thus become evident only when examining the internal debates within each movement.

We referred at the outset to the difficulty of sorting out the appropriate mix in the determination of activist tactical choice (Johnston, 2010, p. 49). No answer to that problem is likely to apply to all cases, but we suggest in this case that activist ideas are fundamental to their perception of whether the criminal justice system provides an opportunity or threat to the realization of their political goals. To be sure, this does not mean that structures are not important or that ideas alone explain tactical choices. First, the results of court cases are central to our understanding of group mobilization: As noted above, movement actors are cognizant of the likely outcomes of arrest and trial and make tactical choices that are informed by these consequences, and this is true irrespective of the counterintuitive nature of these choices. Second, ideas are not negotiated outside specific cultural contexts; social movement actors in each country acted in ways that were consistent with particular social movement traditions, which we can see as a useful “bridging concept” between structure and culture (see Doherty & Hayes, 2011).

As Polletta (1999, pp. 67-69) argues, cultural traditions, arrangements, codes, and so on may be considered structuring in that they are supraindividual; political structures and embedded ways of acting are themselves a product of culturally specific development. Clearly, in our cases, the political traditions of each state are different; a republican narrative of active citizenship may be considered to be structuring for contentious action in France (see, e.g., Hewlett, 1998, pp. 11-35), and this is not available to activists in the United Kingdom. Moreover, these ideas are negotiated within specific movement-organizational contexts: There is no direct equivalent in the United Kingdom of the Confédération paysanne; there was no counterpart in France of the 1980s British peace movement, for example. In France, the FV campaign sought regulatory intervention from the state; in the United Kingdom, most anti-GMO activists and their precursors saw themselves as radicals, essentially different from the rest of society, and viewed the state as an instrument of global capital and corporations. In this sense their tactics might be construed as an instance of “path dependency” (Pierson, 2000). But as we have shown in our discussion on effectiveness and accountability, there is nothing inevitable about the positions adopted by either movement; in both cases, the dominant ideological position was contested, and movement tactics were produced by a process of challenge and negotiation.

It is possible that the example of the anti-GMO campaigns in the United Kingdom and France provides a unique case. We rather doubt it, however. It is true that the FV campaign is distinctive in its offensive use of the court as a venue for challenge, but there have been a number of other cases in recent years in the United Kingdom and France in which those arrested for protests (e.g., against the arms trade, on climate change, or in antiadvertising actions) have sought to turn criminal defense into political attack, using prosecution to establish the legitimacy of their position and to mobilize wider support. In particular, the availability of jury trials appears to increase the chances of success in the courthouse, demonstrating the importance of judicial structures for the analysis of social movements and the potential political outcomes of deliberate collective law breaking. However, how social movement actors choose to exploit these judicial opportunities is dependent not just on external structuring factors but also on the negotiation of ideas—about identity, about the nature of accountability, about effectiveness—within specific movement settings. We hope further work will address both how prosecution affects mobilization and how, comparatively, different systems affect similar mobilizations.