UK faces formal complaint urging suspension from EITI

Campaigners have launched a formal complaint, demanding that the Extractive Industries Technology Initiative (EITI) suspends the UK.

The UK played a key role in setting up the EITI over 20 years ago, to tackle corruption in the fossil fuel and minerals sector, and to defend the “full, active and effective engagement of civil society”.

But instead of making an “enabling environment” for people to question the industry, as the EITI Standard requires, over recent years the UK has witnessed a devastating assault on protest rights. Draconian laws have been rushed on to the statute book and then enforced with vigour by both Tory and Labour governments.

In July 2024, Daniel Shaw was sentenced to four years in prison for discussing a Just Stop Oil protest over Zoom – a sentence which the UN special rapporteur Michel Forst called “a dark day for peaceful environmental protest” (PDF). The following month, climate activists faced demands of more than £1m in costs, after they were slapped with court orders stopping them from protesting around motorways and railway construction sites. And last December the peaceful protester Gaie Delap was taken back to prison, because Serco couldn’t find a tag to fit her wrist.

As the UK’s membership of the EITI comes up for renewal, Good Law Project has joined the climate justice organisation, Plan B, to submit a formal complaint, demanding the UK’s immediate suspension.

Good Law Project’s executive director, Jo Maugham, said, “Until our government remembers it isn’t a private security firm for the oil and gas industry, recognises the important right to protest, and stops jailing peaceful climate activists, the UK should be suspended from the initiative.”