The Campaign for Posthumous Pardons for those Convicted In Great Britain Under the Witchcraft Acts Between 1542 and 1735

the back-story 

The Witchcraft Act 1735 was an Act of Parliament of the Kingdom of Great Britain which made it a crime, punishable by means of a fine or period of imprisonment, for a person to “pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration, or undertake to tell fortunes”.
The significant difference between the 1735 Act and the former English and Scottish Witchcraft Acts which it repealed was that the new statute made it clear that witchcraft was a fraudulent activity. In contrast, the previous Acts considered witchcraft to be real and a capital offence.
From 24 June 1735, it was no longer lawful to prosecute an individual based on the make-believe idea that some people (those labelled witches) could use harmful magic (maleficium) to cause harm to their neighbour's goods or person.
It is said that when the Bill was introduced it caused raucous laughter to erupt in the Commons. To the majority of these MPs, the idea that women made pacts with the Devil to gain magical power, used familiar spirits and charms to murder, and committed infanticide to make potions from the bodies of young children was a huge joke and source of entertainment.
What Parliament failed to do was to recognize the suffering the former Acts had caused or formally acknowledge the gross miscarriage of justice which had taken place.
Across Europe, it is estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed for crimes of witchcraft between the mid-fifteenth and eighteenth century – crimes they could not have possibly committed. Between 90,000 and 100,000 prosecutions took place in total.
The Georgian Parliament should have exonerated all of the British people who had been incarcerated and executed as witches – innocent people whose lives were destroyed because of hearsay, superstition, and ignorance. But they didn’t. 

We Are Asking the UK Government to do what should have been done almost 300 years ago.


because the exoneration of our historic witches is no longer possible, we want our government to do the next best thing and Pardon every individual who was convicted for witchcraft offences in England, Scotland, and Wales Between 1542 and the repeal of witchcraft legislation in 1735.



The purpose of these pardons is not to forgive those who committed a criminal act - we take the innocence of the convicted "witch" as a given. the action of posthumously pardoning our historic british witches will be a long-overdue formal ACKNOWLEDGEMENT by our policymakers that the british witch trials were a gross miscarriage of justice.  


why your support matters
Misogyny Is Still Rife Today


More than 75% of the people convicted of practising witchcraft were women. Our campaign is also part of the fight for gender equality.

In 2022, whilst delivering her historical apology to the estimated 4,000 people accused of being witches in Scotland, former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon MSP hammered the point that the misogynistic attitudes used to justify the torture, incarceration, and execution of women more than 300 years ago in GB are still with us. In fact, statistics show that violence against women and girls is increasing.

A large proportion of the people who support the Justice for Witches campaign are women who feel enough is enough. Women have been fighting for equality for centuries - our campaign highlights this. By pardoning our historic witches, the UK Government has a perfect opportunity to formally acknowledge that our justice system has let women down. Pardoning our historic witches will be a clear demonstration of the government’s determination to serve women better and not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Witch- Persecution is not a thing of the past


In many countries today, people are still being labelled as witches and blamed for causing ill health and crop failure. These people are often beaten, removed from their communities, and in some circumstances murdered. This form of abuse is so widespread that in 2021 the United Nations passed a Resolution calling on member nations to deal with the growing problem of witchcraft accusations.

Witch-persecution is happening right now in the UK. In 2012 the Government published a National Action Plan to tackle child abuse linked to faith or belief – a somewhat hidden and underreported crime. CALFB is defined as belief in the following concepts: witchcraft and spirit possession, demons or the devil acting through children or leading them astray; the use of belief in magic or witchcraft to create fear in children to make them more compliant when they are being trafficked for domestic slavery or sexual exploitation; the use of children’s body parts to produce potent magical remedies.

As incredulous as it may first appear, many twenty-first-century people blame their misfortune on witches, just like people did in the early modern period. Child protection statistics from 2017/18 show councils dealt with an average of thirty cases of CALFB per week, which was an increase on the previous year.

By pardoning our historic witches – acknowledging that there was and is no justice or justification in abusing and executing people based on this type of unprovable belief – our Government can send a powerful, educational message to would-be perpetrators and cultures who promote this barbaric abuse of innocent children: belief is not justification for abuse.

Contact Justice for Witches

Get in touch!

Join The Community

If you would like to be notified about campaign updates, please follow us on Facebook

>