Filton 24 – judge makes a mockery of the rule of law
In June, four of the Filton 24 defendants – the Palestine Action activists prosecuted for breaking into an Israeli arms factory in Bristol in mid-2024 to destroy weaponry destined for the Zionist military forces laying waste to Gaza – were convicted of criminal damage.
Following the conviction, the judge then ruled that the offences had a “terrorism connection”, allowing him legally to issue the defendants much harsher sentences, which he promptly did, issuing sentences of 5 to 8 years to each of the activists – without the possibility of parole. This is equal to the amount of prison time that on average those convicted of rape spend in prison!
The result had been on the cards for quite some time and the possibility of the defendants being charged with terrorism was discussed in detail in independent media, although largely ignored in the corporate press. One of the remarkable points that stand out from reading about the trial is the immense power that judges have to effectively prevent defendants from being able to defend themselves, by arbitrarily declaring their defence arguments as ‘not relevant’ and banning them from even being mentioned.
Of course, like all arbitrary legal powers, a judge’s power to proscribe the arguments planned by the defence team is theoretically ‘limited’ by all sorts of vague and subjective concepts like ‘the judge must be neutral’, ‘the judge must follow the law’, ‘the right to a fair trial must be ensured’, etc.
The author of this article is not a lawyer and is thus limited in the depth and detail of criticism they can make of this system, but it seems quite obvious even for someone who has never studied law that these supposed ‘limits’ on the judge’s extensive power to muzzle the defence team could easily be abused and discarded in cases where the ruling class has a direct interest in securing a guilty conviction.
This is precisely what Judge Johnson did in this situation, arbitrarily ruling that critical defence arguments like proven Elbit involvement in war crimes and the duty to take action to stop an ongoing genocide were “irrelevant” and therefore illegal to mention to the jury.
One may ask why the defendants in such cases do not try to simply ignore these arbitrary directives and defend themselves as planned. Of course, whilst the theoretical limits on judge power are subjective and unenforceable, the punishment for such a defiant defendant is very clear and swift: contempt of court charges, resulting in an unlimited fine and up to two years in jail – in addition to the charges they previously faced!
The end result was a kangaroo court which, given that the defendants were effectively barred from defending themselves and the jury forbidden to be informed of anything that might incline them towards an acquittal, was near guaranteed to produce convictions.
On top of that is the proclaimed ‘terrorist’ connection. Given how frequently judgments in contentious cases develop into legal precedents that are effectively considered to be ‘the law’ for all future cases, the significance of this cannot be overstated.
In plain English, you can now be convicted as a ‘terrorist’ for damage to private property, if it is considered that you damaged the property for political reasons.
So if, for example, someone were to spray paint an environmental slogan on the wall at a Shell refinery, this could potentially be charged as having a terrorist connection and result in a dramatically increased prison sentence. The possibility of parole is also withdrawn, meaning they must serve their full sentence without any chance of being let out early as standard prisoners can be. Following the full sentence being served, even after release the defendant may be kept under surveillance, house arrest and/or travel bans indefinitely, for as long as the police and courts wish.
This ‘terrorist connection’ decision was not, however, put to the jury, who were led to believe that they were merely convicting the defendants of criminal damage to property. Rather, this decision was also entirely at Judge Johnson’s discretion and, needless to say, merely mentioning its possibility to the jury was also on the list of ‘irrelevant’ prohibited defence arguments.
Whilst Britain’s most high-profile political prisoners since the Irish hunger strikers of the 1980s were being handed down draconian sentences by this kangaroo court, a similar kangaroo setup in the form of the Court of Appeal handed out a related and even more depressingly predictable verdict: approving the government’s ban on the entire Palestine Action organisation and throwing out the previous ruling that had declared the ban unlawful.
At the time of the original ruling in favour of PA, PA’s supporters and sympathisers, many of whom should really have known better, almost unanimously took this as a ‘victory’ and celebrated it to the high heavens. Combined with the human-wave style mass ‘get yourself arrested’ campaign waged by the mysterious Defend Our Juries movement of questionable origin – a movement which appeared superficially very strong at that time but has since virtually disappeared – many if not most people were led to believe that PA was on the cusp of a sensational victory over the government.
For those with a lucid understanding of British imperialism and how it functions, such optimism felt misplaced from the start. Why would the High Court, an instrument of control of the imperialist bourgeoisie ruling class, defy its own masters on such a critical issue as Britain’s ability to export the means of warfare to its Zionist partners-in-crime in the Middle East?
As covered in detail by the independent journalist Craig Murray, the grounds under which the High Court had ruled in favour of PA were extraordinarily flimsy – so flimsy, in fact, that the decision seemed almost designed to be reversed on appeal. The High Court had not challenged the claim that PA was involved in terrorist activity. Rather, the High Court judges had argued that then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had rushed to proscribe the organisation too soon and supposedly failed to consider alternatives to proscription (these ‘alternatives’ were never specified).
In short: ‘Everyone agrees that PA are terrorists doing terrorist things. But that doesn’t mean you have to be in such a rush to ban them!’. Needless to say, it would be extremely easy for the government to challenge and overturn such a ridiculous premise.
In addition, despite ruling that the ban was unlawful, the High Court stated that the ban would remain in force until the Court of Appeal could rule on the government’s appeal of the decision. This is a complete reversal of standard judicial practice, where an action found to be unlawful is typically cancelled with immediate effect and then only reinstated if the appeal is upheld. This only added to the overwhelming impression that the ruling was a charade designed to be overturned from the get-go.
What is happening in this country is that the bourgeois ruling class is beginning to lose its ability to control by peaceful means the hearts and minds of the general population. What really put the spanner in the works was the bourgeois government and its loyal bourgeois opposition demanding of the British public that they accept unquestioningly the idea that the bombing by Israel of defenceless civilians in Gaza, leading to the death of tens of thousands of innocent people, including a distressingly high number of little children and babies, was somehow justified and should not be categorised as genocide. British people, however, are not stupid. Moreover, all of us are only too well aware of the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, with the determination that such a thing should never again happen. So as we witnessed the horrors of Gaza, there weren’t very many people who could be lulled by bourgeois propagandists into believing that this was not a genocide. It followed that there would be a general sense among the population that if nothing could be done actually to prevent it, at very least nothing should be done to assist it. Yet our government was, and is, doing just that! Its credibility suffered a stunning blow.
Such is the contempt with that the ruling classes have for the ordinary working class masses, that they believe they have every right to demand compliance with their orders, and in its absence they think they are justified in bringing out the big stick of the Law, which is what they have done in this case. They have succeeded in following the destruction of the credibility of their government with the destruction of the myth of the impartiality of their legal system, humiliating all the distinguished legal persons who have prostituted themselves to declare that damaging property can amount to ‘terrorism’, and that defendants in criminal cases can be prevented from adducing relevant evidence or putting forward convincing arguments. The supposed majesty of the law has been reduced to a mockery.
The democratic mask is slipping away from the face of the British bourgeoisie, while all the while working class living standards are falling and are due to fall further as the imperialist powers turn to waging war – at the expense of the safety and wellbeing of their own populations – in their bid to continue to extract increasing amounts of wealth from the world to stuff into their overflowing treasure chests. The result will sooner or later be that these bloodsuckers will be faced with the rage of not just a few idealistic youths and elderly placard holders whom they can bully and suppress, but with a torrent of stoutly determined British workers determined to ensure that they boot out for once and for all this bourgeois excrescence in our society.