Greenpeace Blog

Kingsnorth Six leaving Maidstone Crown Court after being found not guilty © Rezac / Greenpeace

Last time I looked we had a long and honourable tradition in this country of respect for justice and juries. And, though some might think it strange to say so, that respect lies at the heart of Greenpeace's direct action culture. Greenpeace volunteers take personal responsibility for their actions and leave it to 'the people', in the form of a 12-person randomly selected jury, to determine whether that action was appropriate and lawful or not.

Despite the gloom coming out of the EU climate talks at the end of last week (and the non-event that UN discussions on the same topic in Poznan appear to have been), there is one ray of hope shining from Brussels in the form of the Renewable Energy Target which will set binding goals for EU governments on sourcing energy from renewable sources.

It's been a tough road, not least because of ex-business secretary John Hutton's attempts to weaken the deal. Then it looked like some countries - Italy and Poland were the ringleaders - were going to knobble the agreement by demanding it be reviewed in 2014 but a compromise was put forward and a deal has been reached.

High-tech smuggling operations may not be what you'd normally associate with the ongoing clearance of the Amazon rainforest, but logging companies intent on plundering it for timber have been using hackers to break into the Brazilian government's sophisticated tracking system and fiddle the records.

To monitor the amount of timber leaving the Amazon state of Pará, the Brazilian environment ministry did away with paper dockets and two years ago introduced an online system. Companies logging the rainforest for timber or charcoal production are only allowed to fell a certain amount of timber every year and this is controlled by the use of transport permits issued by the state government's computer system.