Palestine Action defendants are facing sentencing as terrorists despite being convicted of criminal damage, lifted reporting restrictions reveal.
After reporting restrictions were lifted on Tuesday, Middle East Eye is now able to report for the first time that the court will seek to add a “terrorism connection” to their charges at sentencing - a fact that was kept secret from the jury.
Reporting restrictions also barred media from revealing that the defendants had been prohibited from explaining the motivations for their involvement in the raid to jurors.
Prior to the initial trial, the judge had ruled to remove the defence of lawful excuse on the charge of criminal damage, which meant the activists could not argue that the damage they caused was legally justified to prevent greater crimes being committed by Israel’s military in Gaza.
And the muppets over there claim they live in a country with Rule Of Law…
This is the UK
That’s not normal…
It’s difficult to believe that this is legal and won’t be thrown out by a higher court on appeal.
People need to read about Aggravation
Yeah this is actually insane. DO NOT LET THIS GO.
Ok, I won’t.
Absurd argument dismissing basically all context as “irrelevant” such as they have the right to stop genocidal weapon shipments.
The fact that that is an option for the judge is insane. That a judge can just be like, “I literally don’t give a shit about this topic. In fact it’s illegal for you to mention it, regardless of the relevance.”
Yep and this happens in a lot of different court cases like you see it often in average criminal trials where the judge throws out information and bans it due to “irrelevance” when it obviously is very relevant.
What is the check and balance mechanism for this? Judges can’t act arbitrarily - they need to adhere to a standard I imagine
Appeals
You’re assuming Britain has genuine Rule Of Law rather than the Law being a tool to enforce the will of a few, a tall assumption.
Death to england
I mean they already doing this to themselves. Nothing but Ls since Brexit. If it wasn’t for London’s grip on elite marketplaces the country would be collapsing already.
Nothing but Ls since Thatcher.
The game is rigged and the UK has decided it is an accomplice to crimes against humanity.
A bunch of the Labour top team are in the “Labour Friends of Israel” group. Starmer is in it, Streeting is in it. As is anybody else with a chance, because anyone else is in the “antisemite” group, and not allowed to do anything.
Don’t expect this to change. Farage or the Tories wouldn’t change it either.
Us and the septics set Israel up. It’s our little project, and we can’t do much apart from voting Green (who are now also smeared as antisemites and run by fundamentalist Muslims, despite being run by a gay Jew). Even then the US would prop them up forever. As long as oil is a thing, they need Israel to project power on the Middle East.
This is not new for the UK. They always pretended that they were on the side of law
Ghislane and Epstein worked there extensively. Andrew was just the dumb crown jewel
They are an active participant, taking pleasure in it. This prosecution, and what it has shown of their character, being so full of hate for those protesting genocide, had given lie to the labour party’s bullshit.
so they’re trying to blame their accidental/deliberate act of accidental terrorism on the jury
they did not think this through
Always has been.
Convicted for one crime and sentenced for another? Sounds like freedom and democracy!
It’s the UK lol, it’s never been for those things
B I R T H S T R I K E
UK citizens need to stand up to the UK government with a simple message: do what we fucking say or we will march straight off a demographic cliff. No reproduction without representation. No reproduction while the government supports the bombing of children elsewhere.
So many people can’t even change their shopping habits to make more ethical choices. There’s no way a sizeable population is going to forego passing on their DNA just to send a message.
As a teen, I figured I’d adopt kids when I got older. The amount of people who were dead-set on “b-b-but my genetic lineage!” was startling. As I’ve aged through my 20s and now my 30s, I’ve seen them stick true to their word and have their own babies, even with the world circling down the drain. The biological call to reproduce seems to override a lot of other matters.
Now consider how hard it is to get people to quit something without a biological imperative, like shopping on Amazon…
Anyway, I admire your initiative. I just can’t imagine people participating en masse in a protest that involves forfeiting something so dear and intimate to them as their choice to reproduce.
Too long a time lag to achieve anything.
You’re just a right wing psy op to repress the birth of future left leaning voters! /s (I got inspired by recent comments I’ve seen)
But it’s an interesting idea that could royally screw with a country if followed through. But I think it has abysmal chances of actually happening. Choosing to not have kids when a couple is both willing and able is an incredibly large sacrifice to those that want kids. And you wouldn’t see if such a strike worked until 9 months later (or a not earlier since there wouldn’t be as many pregnancy scans).
I realize this is the UK, where their judicial system is still rooted in the authority of the crown, and not the people, but in any civilized country, putting one charge to trial and sentencing them for another is not justice.
Isn’t it more like they accused them of damaging property, the jury agreed that they did damage property and the judge decides that the damage was serious enough to fall under terrorism? It’s like mitigating circumstances. The jury decides if a parson did X but it’s up to the judge to decide if any mitigating circumstances should apply before sentencing. Here the circumstances are aggravating.
But they weren’t convicted of terrorism, which has a legal definition. So the judge shouldn’t be considering it as an aggravating circumstance since there’s no terrorism conviction.
The aggravation is terrorist connection , not terrorism. They don’t have to be convicted of terrorism for the terrorism connection aggravation to apply.
https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/guidelines/offences-with-a-terrorist-connection-guidance/
From what I’ve read Schedule 1 are terrorism related charges. As you can see terrorist connection aggravation can be applied to crimes covered and not covered by Schedule 1.
The king should intervene
You’re right about the substance, but are you saying that most of the EU, Canada, Australia, New zealand are not civilized?
I’m not aware of that happening in any of those places, but if the shoe fits.
No it’s not, but all those places are monarchies and derive their law ultimately from the authority from a crown
canada is supposed to only be connected symbolically. We even gave them a fuckload of canada geese as a thinly veiled fuck you
Canada are equally as much a monarchy as the UK in legal and ceremonial mechanisms, same as all the others. Functionally their democracies all work extremely similarly for most Commonwealth derived countries
Well, the EU is not a monarchy, and Canada/Australia/NZ have been distancing themselves from the UK, so maybe not exactly what I was talking about, but I still hold that this is not the action of a fair and just system.
The EU isn’t a monarchy but the OP meant that there’s still a number of constitutional monarchies in the union.
Also Canada and Australia aren’t really the best examples here. Speaking as a Canadian, we’ve been actually increasing our ties to the UK as Americans continue their assault on our economy and continue to insult our sovereignty.
Regarding the genocide, we have banned exports to Israel for anything that can be used to murder Palestinians, but the loopholes are so large that it’s basically meaningless and our government refuses to close them
We only banned new permits and you siad it we are allowing loopholes so we are selling materisl and wespons used to kill Palestinians . We also allows the selling on occupied land in synaguoges and allowing idf terrorists in our schools.
A majority of the EUs member states are monarchies and the Commonwealth nations have not distanced themselves legally or ceremonially on any meaningful way that I’m aware of in recent history
There are 6 monarchies in the EU out of 27 member states. Stop lying.
You’re correct. There are 12 European monarchies but a number of the city-states are not technically EU member states. I should have said Europe rather than EU, and I was outright incorrect to say majority.
Does it change any of what I’ve said? Many of the most well developed countries on the planet are monarchies. The original intent of my post was to call that out
This from the same judge who tried to hold their lawyer in contempt and had it thrown out by a higher court in the span of, like, a day?
Indeed. judge “Justice Johnson” is the one doing all these wildly draconian moves to get Palestine Action convicted as terrorists.
His name is straight out of a comic bookJust in case you weren’t aware (and I’m not missing anything), judges in the UK are given the title of Justice in a way which admittedly does make it look like their first name
That makes more sense. Figured it was their real name because of the capitalization
This is reminding me a lot of the Prairieland case in the US, and that really doesn’t bode well for the defense.
How very draconian
Surprised I haven’t seen this word getting more use in recent times
Europe is starting to act a lot more like Nazi Germany & Nazi Israel. Wonder how many people are caught up in Netanyahu’s trafficking of minors. My guess is it is thousands… All those Christian Nationalists they invite over there.
