Catalogue Number
NMLH.2025.13
Object Name
leaflet
Title
'GMC shame on you. Another doctor suspended for peaceful climate protest. Dr Hart suspended for 12 months pending trial'
Place
Manchester, UK
People
NHS, General Medical Council, Health For Extinction Rebellion, Dr Hart, Extinction Rebellion
Events
Dr Hart GMC hearing protests April 2025
Description
A white leaflet. The front has a photo of Dr Hart in the bottom left corner - a white man with brown hair and a short beard. Text reads: 'GMC shame on you. Another doctor suspended for peaceful climate protest. Dr Hart suspended for 12 months pending trial'. There is a QR code to the Health for Extinction Rebellion website which shares information about Dr Hart's actions. The reverse is three paragraphs of text about Dr Hart's actions and the protests against the GMC.
This leaflet was collected by PHM staff outside the General Medical Council (GMC) head office in Spinningfields, Manchester, from protesters who were supporting Dr Patrick Hart during his fitness to practice tribunal. Dr Hart, a GP from Bristol, was sentenced to a year in prison for criminal damage for disabling fuel pumps at a petrol station during a Just Stop Oil climate protest. When a practicing medical professional is convicted of a crime, GMC guidelines dictate their medical license is suspended and their fitness to practice is investigated, regardless of the nature of the conviction. The leaflet points out that this would mean that hypothetically, if the government were to "recriminalise homosexuality, the GMC would unthinkingly suspend all homosexual doctors found guilty under this law". They draw a comparison between convictions for climate activism and homosexuality with the intention of situating climate activism convictions as an unjust prosecution, and as something which does not impair fitness to practice medicine.
Dr Hart's sentence of 12 months in prison was criticised by UN Special Rapporteur Michel Forst, who in a BBC interview criticised UK laws against protest as "draconian" and compared treatment of protesters in the UK to countries with global reputations for human rights abuses like Honduras, saying "If you compare the situation in the UK with other European countries, you don't see such harsh sentences." Mr Forst also criticised the suspension of his medical license saying the GMC were "punishing him for a second time, for having taken action to address what the GMC itself calls 'one of the greatest threats to human health' Added to his conviction by a court, this professional sanction would not only be a form of penalisation, persecution or harassment of Dr Hart, it would also be one that is based on an astonishingly paradoxical reasoning." The protestors outside the GMC during the tribunal were other healthcare professionals, some practicing and some retired, and they pledged to protest every day of the tribunal to raise public awareness that the GMC was "persecuting" doctors who participated in climate activism.
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