The climate activist Greta Thunberg is due to appear in court in late July after being charged with refusing to obey police orders during an anti-oil protest in the Swedish port city of Malmö last month, local media have reported.
The charge, believed to be Thunberg’s first, comes after the 20-year-old climate campaigner joined a six-day protest organised by the environmental group Take Back the Future at the city’s oil terminal on 19 June.
Sydsvenskan reported that the activist, who began her school strike for climate at the age of 15 in Stockholm and rose to international prominence through the Fridays for Future youth climate movement, was detained with three others.
The four were part of a group of about 20 protesters blocking the road and climbing on tankers to stop them entering or leaving the terminal, police told the newspaper, but unlike others had refused to comply with orders to leave.
“The prosecutor has filed charges against a young woman who on 19 June this year participated in a climate demonstration which, according to the prosecution, caused disruption to traffic in Malmö,” the prosecutor’s office said in a brief statement.
The statement did not name Thunberg, but a spokesperson confirmed it was her. The prosecutor, Charlotte Ottosen, told Sydsvenskan that freedom to demonstrate did not extend to the right to cause a disturbance for others.
The protesters were dragged away from the scene because they “did not obey” individual police instructions to move off the road, Ottosen said, adding that the process was filmed. She said similar offences “usually lead to fines”.
Thunberg wrote in an Instagram post on the day she joined the protest that the climate crisis was “already a matter of life and death for countless people. We choose to not be bystanders, and instead physically stop the fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Thunberg, who is said to be planning to defend herself at the district court appearance on 24 July, would not be available for comment in the meantime, a spokesperson told Swedish media.
Take Back the Future said the terminal’s fossil fuel cargoes were a bigger problem than that its activists were being prosecuted. “The real crime is inside the gates we blocked,” its spokesperson, Irma Kjellström, said.
“We will continue our opposition to this type of activity,” said Kjellström, who has also been charged. “We are not going to wait and contribute to the fossil fuel industry continuing to take our dreams away from us.”
Thunberg was twice briefly detained by police in Oslo during a demonstration against windfarms on Indigenous people’s land rights in March, and in January during protests in Germany against the demolition of a village to make way for a coalmine.
