The Crown, for purely political reasons, has chosen to spend tens of thousands of pounds pursuing eight of us through the courts, despite our already having been acquitted. Whilst we were trying to prevent war crimes and crimes against humanity the Crown took obstructing the highway as more serious. But, having lost their case for obstruction they tried to appeal, and were slapped down by the Judge twice. Now they are spending far more in trying to get the Judge’s decision judicially reviewed! It is clear that it is not about our minor cases of obstructing the highway, but because they do not like the fact that the Judge went out of his way to make clear that illegal activity occurs at the Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI) arms fair; and that the police are doing nothing about the crimes there. And the crimes taking place, or supported, at DSEI include war crimes, crimes against humanity and the sale of illegal equipment such as torture equipment.
The facts are not contested.
The DSEI arms fair is one of the largest arms fairs in the world, held
every other year in London, and each time illegal activity takes place there
including both the sale of illegal equipment including torture equipment and
cluster bombs and that weapons are sold in the knowledge that they will be used
to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity. It was also accepted that the police, and
other authorities, do little, if anything to detect or prosecute these crimes.
A large group of ordinary people felt so strongly that it
was necessary to prevent these very serious crimes that they chained themselves
to vehicles, each other or the gates or simply lay in front of lorries in each
case to try to prevent arms from being delivered to DSEI and hence sold to
murder civilians in Yemen, Palestine, Turkey, Kurdistan or any of the other places
where crimes against humanity are being committed.
This much is not seriously in dispute; the result is that
all eight defendants were acquitted on April 15 by Mr Justice Angus Hamilton as
we were trying to prevent crime. In his summing
up Hamilton said:
“the court has been presented
with clear, credible and largely unchallenged evidence from three experts that
criminal wrongdoing had occurred at past DSEI exhibitions involving the sale of
arms to countries which then used those arms against civilian populations and
the sale of items that were inherently unlawful such as cluster munitions and
items designed for torture and inappropriate restraint. There was, as a result,
a compelling inference that such activities would also take place at the 2015
DSEI exhibition.
“The court was also presented
with clear, credible and largely unchallenged evidence that such criminal
activities are not being properly investigated and, where appropriate,
prosecuted. Ample evidence of this was provided by the three experts.”
In other words, the prosecution did not challenge our
evidence that criminality habitually occurs at DSEI and that the police were
doing nothing about it; so it fell to us as concerned citizens to attempt to
prevent some of the most serious crimes imaginable.
In trying to deny us the right to use crime prevention the
prosecution relied on two main arguments:
·
That we had not used sufficient force to be able to use section 3 of the Criminal Law
Act 1967 which says “A person may use such force as is reasonable in the
circumstances in the prevention of crime….”
The crown argued that we did not use sufficient force to be allowed to
rely on this act; which has the interesting effect that the defence might be allowable
if we had used greater force!
·
That the crime was not sufficiently imminent to allow
us to intervene; and that we should instead rely on the police to enforce the
law. Which we were able to clearly
demonstrate that they had failed to do in the past and no evidence that they
would enforce the law this time.
With the court having rejected these the Crown chose to
appeal by asking the Judge to “State Case” (ie to allow the appeal on points of
law). However, they made such a
cack-handed attempt that Mr Justice Hamilton was moved to write:
“I decline to state a case on the
basis of the current application as it is frivolous, and in particular it is misconceived”.
and
“The CPS application repeatedly
significantly misrepresents the contents of the judgement delivered at the end
of the case and therefore seeks to challenge the decisions reached on wholly
erroneous bases. The CPS application also muddles factual decisions with
decisions of law and it is not open to the CPS to seek to appeal findings of
fact.”…. “In these circumstances the very least the CPS should do is to read
the judgement fully and, if appropriate, frame their application based on what
was actually decided rather than what they seem to believe was decided. The CPS
also needs to make a significantly better effort to identify any claimed errors
of law as distinct from findings of fact.”
Rather than accepting this slap from the Judge they wrote a
long and detailed explanation of their original request for appeal which the Mr
Justice Hamilton also declined saying:
“There may be an appealable point
in this case but unless and until the CPS prepares its application on the basis
of what was actually said in my judgement (rather than something they appear to
imagine was said) I am simply not prepared to implicitly condone such poor
preparation by stating a case on the current application.”
Despite this further slap down the Crown has now decided to
try to get the decision of the judge judicially reviewed by the High
Court. Apparently, to achieve this they
will have to demonstrate that no
reasonable person could have acted as the judge did in refusing the appeal!
The Crown has already spent tens of thousands of pounds
pursuing this relatively trivial case, but have now briefed a QC and prepared a
two-hundred-page document! Yes! Two hundred pages! Which they have submitted to
start the Judicial review proceedings.
They are asking either that the court quash the Learned District Judge's
decision to acquit the interested parties (ie the defendants) and direct that
the case be remitted to the magistrates' court so that it may be heard in
accordance with the law; or to make an order compelling the magistrates' court
to state a case.
Note that they are asking for a complete new trial – which would
presumably require many more thousands of pounds to be spent both by the
prosecution and the defence as well as witness’s time and court time. I should also point out that we only offered
one of our defences in the original trial – that we were trying to prevent
crime as the judge said he would rule on that defence before hearing our other
defences. So even if this defence is
rejected we should go back to the original court and offer our other defences
which include the use of the European Convention of Human Rights Article 9 Freedom
of thought, conscience and religion, Article 10 Freedom of expression and
Article 11 Freedom of assembly and association.
Instead, we hope that common sense will prevail and that the
High Court will not allow this clearly politically motivated request for a
judicial review, and allow our acquittal to stand.
