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.
It must have been work to conceal this from the jury.
No wonder they’re trying to do away with these pesky jury trials.
It really will help to make examples of people with minimal effort.
Bonus points for setting it up just in time for what is very possibly going to be a fascistic government.
The game is rigged and the UK has decided it is an accomplice to crimes against humanity.
Always has been.
The UK has historically always been the villain
This is not new for the UK. They always pretended that they were on the side of law
so they’re trying to blame their accidental/deliberate act of accidental terrorism on the jury
they did not think this through
Yeah this is actually insane. DO NOT LET THIS GO.
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
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.
No, they are most likely wondering what the intended checks and balances are. Not how they are used in practice (which we already know). I am also curious.
Well, sometimes the Supreme Court in the UK does do the right thing, though only after people have been Harassed-by-Court for months or even years and in practice only for people with enough money to afford the solicitor and barrister fees to take their case all the way up to it.
Sometimes it’s even worse - when the Law it’s actually in the books it might mean going all the way up to the European Court Of Human rights (which is not an EU organisation and still applies to the UK as long as they’re a member of the European Convention On Human Rights).
The system of check and balances is at best there only for people with enough money to afford it. (Though I suppose they could do as one of my family members did in my home country and actually get a Law Degree and take the case herself all the way up to the ECHR, though in the UK I believe even the cheapest Universities are pretty expensive)
Then, of course, there’s the other side of the injustice - actually punishing the guilty: the Crown Prosecution Service and other entities which prosecute crimes are pretty arbitary about who they go after as they can simply say “it’s not in the Public Interest” and that’s justification enough not to prosecute, with one’s wealth being inverselly correlated to one’s likelihood of being prosecuted (something indirectly admited by a previous head of the Serious Fraud Office - who are tasked with not just large scale Fraud but also Corruption - when they admitted they could only afford to prosecute as single large case per year) and the same for appealing even court rulings such as the one of the High Court Judge who, when convicting a public school educated criminal (read: so almost certainly somebody who is upper middle class or rich) for the crime of Fraud for the second time, sent him away with a veredict of Guilty but no penalty with the reasoning that “the shame of a conviction is punishment enough”.
Thanks for taking your time to answer in a constructive way. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting that (not because of you, but from the general attitude I’ve seen here on Lemmy lately).
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.
Signs of a healthy legal system and society.
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.
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
Convicted for one crime and sentenced for another? Sounds like freedom and democracy!
And the muppets over there claim they live in a country with Rule Of Law…
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.
Half of the UK parliament is chosen by the monarch. The other half is chosen through the problematic and undemocratic first past the post voting system. UK streets have CCTV everywhere. UK libel laws are extreme. The state-owned media defends pedophiles and transphobes, while the private media focuses on gossip and lies rather than reporting on the news (on top of also defending transphobes and pedophiles, of course).
It’s time for people to admit to themselves that the UK, especially England, is a dictatorship.
Half of the UK parliament is chosen by the monarch.
No.
The other half is chosen through the problematic and undemocratic first past the post voting system.
Yes.
UK streets have CCTV everywhere.
It’s not the CCTV you want to worry about. The CCTV is overwritten regularly and typically goes nowhere. It’s the internet-connected stuff you wanted to worry about, and the blanket surveillance by Google and meta. Carrying a smartphone and worrying about CCTV while you post pictures of yourself where LLMs can scrape them is utterly irrational.
It’s time for people to admit to themselves that the UK, especially England, is a dictatorship.
No, just a half-police state. But at least you tend not to get murdered by the police for being black in charge of a vehicle in the UK, and the healthcare is free.
This, though, this is AWFUL and they went OUT OF THEIR WAY to deny these people justice. If you deny the defendants the right to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, you have denied them justice.
So you’re just going to pretend that the house of lords don’t exist?
The House of Lords appointment process is bizarre. Parties sell the seats to political donors, the church still seats lords and the monarch has influence but not control over the process. They also just reformed out the last hereditary peers. Its not entirely democratic but not that monarchist either. Its probably best described as an oligarchist institution imo.
That’s somehow even worse and more corrupt than I thought it was.
I think thats a somewhat fair take, but its definitely not a system dominated by the monarch. The ruling political and economic classes are in the drivers seat.
I’m not going to pretend that the monarch chooses them. The prime minister chooses them and has done for a looooooong time.
It’s not the CCTV you want to worry about. The CCTV is overwritten regularly and typically goes nowhere.
yes, it is the CCTV. Because there is no way to verify by yourself that the recordings don’t get transmitted or processed for their contents all the time.
Carrying a smartphone and worrying about CCTV while you post pictures of yourself where LLMs can scrape them is utterly irrational.
that’s a huge assumption. that kind of people don’t usually complain about CCTVs.
Some of the other errors in your post have been pointed out already, but i wanted to mention one additional one - there is no state media in the UK
as for camping it a dictatorship, you’ve got good comic timing on that one
BBC
Yes, i figured that’s what you meant. I assume that your knowledge of the BBC is as well-informed as your knowledge of the House of Lords.
The BBC is not state media
“The Chairman and the non-executive members for the nations are appointed by HM The King on the recommendation of Ministers while the other members of the Board are appointed by the BBC through the Board’s Nominations and Governance committee.”
“The BBC is primarily funded by a compulsory annual TV license fee paid by UK households.”
That’s a state media, regardless of what it may view itself as.
Edit: Also, I wasn’t wrong about the House of Lord being dictatorial. The things I was wrong about was the complexity of the dictatorship. Instead of it all being chosen by the monarch, some of it is chosen through bribes, some by theocrats and some by politicians. None of the seats are directly chosen by the people, like in a democracy, and that was the whole damn point!
State media means that the government has editorial control, which it does not with the BBC. If they were they wouldn’t have broken stories around the Pincher scandal which was the downfall of the Johnson government, for example
And state media is funded by the state. As you correctly quoted, the BBC is funded by the public
As with your comments on the Lords, it seems like you’ve heard some reactionary soundbites and regurgitated them as fact because they fit into your world view, rather than taking the time to learn how the things you’re criticising actually work and forming your opinion from there
How very draconian
That’s not normal…
United Klandom
Holy shit it’s the UK? I read the whole post thinking it was Israel, being like “yeah that’s par for the course for them”
Wow, Israel really does have a hunch of powerful UK politicians and judges by the balls, doesn’t it?
What balls?
