When jurors are called to court, they are required to swear on a holy book or make a secular promise to tell the truth.
So court officials were perplexed when the environmental activist and barrister Paul Powlesland was called for jury service and produced a vial of river water and asked to swear on the River Roding.
“To take water into court you have to sip it to make sure it’s not a bad substance,” said Powlesland, the founder of the River Roding Trust, a charity that works to clean up London’s third-largest river. “When they asked me to do that I thought, ‘Oooh, I don’t know what Thames Water have put in this.’”
When Powlesland sought to swear on the water, the judge and usher at a London crown court – which lies within the catchment of the Roding – said they had never received such a request before. After some consultations, Powlesland was allowed to become probably the first person to make a legal oath in a British court based upon his devotion to a river – after he had given a secular affirmation to cover conventional legal bases.
“I explained that nature is my God and I believe the Roding to be sacred and I manifest love in action for her, and in all the things that I do for her, and it would be a really meaningful promise to me,” said Powlesland. “I dipped my finger into a cup of the Roding water and said that ‘I swear on the River Roding from her source in Molehill Green to her confluence with the Thames that I will faithfully try the case and give a true verdict according to the evidence.’
“I got a feeling from the judge that he felt the truth in my voice, that this was a meaningful, sacred promise to me. It wasn’t just me playing silly buggers.”
Powlesland is also the co-founder of Lawyers for Nature, a group campaigning for elements of the natural world to be recognised in law in Britain. Rivers, lakes and rainforests have been given legal personhood in countries including New Zealand, Spain, Ecuador and Australia.
Powlesland said he hoped his oath would inspire others to take similar action.
“It’s another way of reintroducing the idea of nature as sacred back into our legal system, finding playful ways to demonstrate to the world that nature is alive, that nature is sacred and we have duties towards it,” he said.
“I believe it’s the first time that anyone’s given a legal oath, a juror’s oath, on a river, and I hope that many others follow suit and animism is soon found more regularly in our courts.”
