4th June 2025: Health workers and patients protest outside the General medical council’s committee meeting for third time

Posted by: Alice - Posted on:

 A vigil and protest was again held outside the General Medical Council’s committee meeting in London this morning to highlight the council’s failure to protect the public from the climate health emergency, and its ongoing persecution of doctors who have taken peaceful climate action to save lives. Government guidance states that ‘health and care professionals should ‘recognise the climate crisis as a health crisis and therefore climate action as a core part of their professional responsibilities’(1).

This is the 3rd GMC council meeting (2,3) that has drawn protests since the first medical fitness to practice tribunal convened to discipline a doctor for peaceful climate action suspended Dr Sarah Benn in April, 2024 (4) . Dr Sarah Benn now faces a second tribunal relating to protest, and a review of her initial suspension, with the hearings starting on the 9th June this year.

Since Dr Benn’s suspension, retired GP Dr Warner has also been suspended for taking peaceful climate action (5). The last few months have also seen a series of vigils held outside the GMC’s offices in London in solidarity with working GP Dr Patrick Hart (6). Dr Hart was imprisoned from January to May for undertaking peaceful climate action, and in March was suspended by the GMC pending his tribunal in October this year (7). The UN special rapporteur for environmental defenders has spoken out against this treatment of UK doctors, indicating that the UK may be in breach of the Aarhus convention of which it is a signatory (8). 

The GMC insist that they have a legal responsibility to prosecute doctors like Dr Hart, Dr Warner and Dr Benn through referral to the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) and furthermore argue that incarceration for peaceful climate action is de facto evidence of behaviour that would undermine the public’s confidence in the profession (9). They fail, however, to acknowledge that they are responsible for writing their own guidance, that they employ lawyers to argue for maximum censure at the MPTS hearings, and that they have, to date, presented no evidence to support the claim that peaceful climate activism undermines public confidence in the medical profession (10).

Under the GMC’s current regulatory framework, the MPTS, although nominally independent, in practice simply acts to rubber stamp any legal decisions handed down by the UK judiciary, in effect resulting in double jeopardy punishment of the doctor.  This lack of ethical or moral independence is of growing concern given the internationally criticised anti protest legislation adopted by the last Conservative government, and upheld by the current Labour administration (11, 12). Of note is that in 2023 the GMC made a public apology for striking off doctors who had been found guilty under historically homophobic legislation(13), yet, under its current framework it would do exactly the same again were these laws to be re-enacted.

To show your support for health professionals undertaking climate action please sign the following petition and open letter.

 References:

Press Contact:

Dr Alice Clack – 07919 882 601

Dr Kathy Fallon – ⁨07526 069337⁩