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.
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.
If you have to hide significant evidence from the jury, that’s a pretty good indication you’re doing something wrong.
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”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Wow, Israel really does have a hunch of powerful UK politicians and judges by the balls, doesn’t it?
What balls?
And the muppets over there claim they live in a country with Rule Of Law…
This is the UK
Exactly!
UK isn’t much better off rn.
It’s difficult to believe that this is legal and won’t be thrown out by a higher court on appeal.
Depends how far the rot goes.
This has to have been a politically motivated act. Influence occurring behind the scenes. What if that extends to appeals or the high court?
UK supreme court hasn’t exactly covered themselves in glory so far.
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.
The UK has historically always been the villain
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.
Ghislane and Epstein worked there extensively. Andrew was just the dumb crown jewel
This is not new for the UK. They always pretended that they were on the side of law
Always has been.
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.
Ok, I won’t.
That’s not normal…
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).
Appeals
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.
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
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.
To make this determination the court may hear evidence, and must take account of any representations made by the parties.
This did not happen as far as I can tell. Neither are any of the listed examples applicable.
You’re saying the activist where not allowed to testify? I doubt that. This covers offenses specified in Schedule 1 and not specified in Schedule 1 so anything can apply.
But most importantly, aggravating is a very concrete thing. Jury doesn’t have to know anything about it because it’s not a charge. There’s a charge that the jury decides upon and aggregating/mitigating circumstances that the judge decides. The central claim of the article, that the activist will be sentenced for some crimes the jury didn’t know about is pure manipulation.
I imagine they can fight the verdict in higher court and they can appeal the aggregation and maybe it will be determined that the judge was wrong here but what the article implies is simply a lie.
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.
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
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
