A PRIEST involved in the citizen’s arrest of oil company executives this week says she hopes that the campaign will “create a gap where the light gets in”.

The Revd Helen Burnett told the Church Times that the purpose of Citizen’s Arrest Network (CAN) was to make the executives of major polluters “visible”.

“These people are personally responsible because of the work they do. . . The result of their work is planetary breakdown,” Ms Burnett, who is Team Vicar of St Peter and St Paul, Chaldon, said on Friday.

The chief executive of EnQuest, Amjad Bseisu, was filmed running away from members of the group on Wednesday after they approached him outside his company’s office in London.

They carried with them a draft indictment accusing him of the crime of public nuisance, alleging that his company’s production, distribution, and disposal of oil amounted to an offence.

Later on Wednesday, citizen’s arrests were carried out on both the general counsel and chief financial officer of the energy company Perenco, Jonathan Parr and Gilles d’Argouges.

Ms Burnett was part of a group who had been hoping to carry out citizen’s arrests on executives at Shell and BP, but they failed to intercept any of the executives on the street. Instead, the group took the legal dossier they had prepared to the police. They also handed a dossier to security guards at the offices of BP in central London.

Asked about her motivation for taking part in the campaign, Ms Burnett said that she had to “think quite hard about this in terms of my Christian calling”, but concluded that the executives of oil companies “could be our modern day Pharisees”.

“Someone needs to shine a light,” she said; and, although she took a realistic view of the chance of the police’s pursuing the executives based on the dossiers, she argued that drawing attention to the issue could be part of a “ripple effect”.

Ms Burnett has previously been convicted for her part in an Extinction Rebellion protest in 2019 (News, 1 April 2021), and was sentenced to a fine and a six-month conditional discharge.

At the time, she told the court: “As vicars, we have the ‘cure of the souls’. That’s not some mere ephemera that flies off to heaven: it is the fully integrated body and spirit — the spiritual and physical well-being of the people in our parishes.

“With a care also for creation, that then extends to the soil, the trees, and all that lies within our parish” (Comment, 29 March 2021).