A PRIEST involved within the citizen’s arrest of oil company executives this week says she hopes that the campaign will “create a niche where the sunshine gets in”.
The Revd Helen Burnett told the Church Times that the aim of Citizen’s Arrest Network (CAN) was to make the executives of major polluters “visible”.
“These individuals are personally responsible due to the work they do. . . The results of their work is planetary breakdown,” Ms Burnett, who’s Team Vicar of St Peter and St Paul, Chaldon, said on Friday.
The chief executive of EnQuest, Amjad Bseisu, was filmed running away from members of the group on Wednesday after they approached him outside his company’s office in London.
They carried with them a draft indictment accusing him of the crime of public nuisance, alleging that his company’s production, distribution, and disposal of oil amounted to an offence.
Later on Wednesday, citizen’s arrests were carried out on each the overall counsel and chief financial officer of the energy company Perenco, Jonathan Parr and Gilles d’Argouges.
Ms Burnett was a part of a bunch who had been hoping to perform citizen’s arrests on executives at Shell and BP, but they did not intercept any of the executives on the road. Instead, the group took the legal dossier that they had prepared to the police. They also handed a dossier to security guards on the offices of BP in central London.
Asked about her motivation for collaborating within the campaign, Ms Burnett said that she needed to “think quite hard about this when it comes to my Christian calling”, but concluded that the executives of oil firms “could possibly be our modern-day Pharisees”.
“Someone must shine a light-weight,” she said; and, although she took a sensible view of the possibility of the police’s pursuing the executives based on the dossiers, she argued that drawing attention to the problem could possibly be a part of a “ripple effect”.
Ms Burnett has previously been convicted for her part in an Extinction Rebellion protest in 2019 (News, 1 April 2021), and was sentenced to a effective and a six-month conditional discharge.
At the time, she told the court: “As vicars, we’ve got the ‘cure of the souls’. That’s not some mere ephemera that flies off to heaven: it’s the fully integrated body and spirit — the spiritual and physical well-being of the people in our parishes.
“With a care also for creation, that then extends to the soil, the trees, and all that lies inside our parish” (Comment, 29 March 2021).
