Justice under Siege: In the Land of the Magna Carta
by Serena Wylde
Britain boasts stewardship of a centuries-old accretive system of justice built on the principles of balanced rights, an independent judiciary and, most importantly, the right to trial by jury.
Yet England and Wales have the highest prison population per capita in Western Europe, and 60% of prisons are overcrowded.
Could this be because the safeguards are being systematically dismantled before our eyes to eliminate the fundamental civil liberties that it has taken centuries to acquire?
The surge in brazenly oppressive treatment of ordinary citizens who oppose British complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has shone a light on the extent to which the institutions have been captured by the Israel Lobby, showing just how far they will go to crush and punish any public support for the direct action group Palestine Action.
A recent report entitled “Britain’s Political Prisoners,” co-authored by Defend our Juries and others, found that “British courts are increasingly using indiscriminate and reckless remand detention, contempt proceedings and excessively lengthy custodial sentences to crack down on dissent.”
Governments hate juries, and the current Executive is attempting to eliminate them, or restrict their vital role in the justice system in whatever way it can. This is because juries are a fundamental check on authoritarian power. Judges can be co-opted by the Executive, but a jury of twelve citizens drawn at random from the electoral register, with no relationship to one another or to the accused, represent an objective body called upon to evaluate the evidence from the perspective of the ordinary reasonable person, and are legally able to acquit on the grounds of moral conscience.
Baroness Helena Kennedy KC wrote in her 2004 book Just Law: “Juries are constitutionally able to acquit in protest at unjust laws. This stems from the principle that trials are about justice as well as law… [A trial] is a mini-parliament, another democratic forum, making law respond to the realities of people’s lives.”
Governmental tactics to limit the scope of juries’ adjudicatory power are not new. In 1984, two years after the Falklands War, an assistant secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Clive Ponting, gave classified documents to an opposition MP proving British naval officers had sunk the Argentine battleship the Belgrano after it had changed course and was heading for port.
Ponting was prosecuted under Section 2 of the 1911 Official Secrets Act (OSA). His defense argued that his actions could not be construed as “contrary to the interests of the state” because he had given the information to Parliament, which was part of the state. The judge rejected the defense, but the jury unanimously acquitted him.
In 1989, in response to Ponting’s acquittal and other ‘embarrassments’, Margaret Thatcher’s government tightened Section 2 of the OSA to remove any possibility of recourse to a public interest defense.
Public interest defense is an accountability safeguard against the misuse of power; therefore, the 1989 changes to the OSA represented a dangerous watershed.
In August 2024, six Palestine Action activists broke into a factory in Filton near Bristol belonging to Israel’s largest arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, which is responsible for producing 85% of the Israel Occupation Forces’ killer drones. The facility is called a ‘research and development’ site, but the activists discovered a large consignment of quadcopter drones, which were being used to drop explosive grenades in Gaza, and as sniper-drones to detect remaining survivors via living pulses. They dismantled and destroyed a number of these weapons.
This action followed ten months of representations to MPs, petitions, mass demonstrations, and an open letter signed by nearly a thousand lawyers and legal scholars, which all failed to move the dial on government complicity in Israel’s atrocities and use of starvation as a weapon against the Palestinians in Gaza.
The six activists were arrested by counter-terrorist police, as were a further 18 people in connection with the action, under what the counter-terrorism unit called “Operation Recomply.”
Each of the 24 were held incommunicado in specialist police units for up to a week, with lights left on 24 hours a day and woken up multiple times for interrogation, before being remanded into prison. They were charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder. One defendant was also charged with grievous bodily harm (GBH).
In July 2025, amidst growing numbers of British citizens coming out in solidarity with the activists and protesting against the government’s failure to uphold international law, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper banned Palestine Action, classifying it as a ‘terrorist’ organization, which made it a criminal offense to show any public support for it.
Palestine Action’s founder, Huda Ammori, immediately sought permission for judicial review to challenge the decision, which was granted later that month. The government attempted to block the challenge, but in October the Court of Appeal upheld the decision. High Court judge Justice Chamberlain, who had granted the judicial review, had conducted the case and was due to issue his judgment before Christmas, but was suddenly and inexplicably removed from the case and three ‘government-friendly’ judges were appointed in his place. By the year-end no decision had been forthcoming.
By this time the Palestine Action defendants had spent over a year in jail as ‘terrorists’, notwithstanding the fact they had been convicted of no crime, no terrorist charge had been brought against them, and at the time of their offenses the organization to which they belonged had not been proscribed as a ‘terrorist’ organization. Their incarceration grossly exceeded the pre-trial detention limit of six months, but their fate was clearly being used both as a message to other anti-genocide protesters, as well as to try and justify to the general public the controversial banning of Palestine Action by portraying activists as ‘dangerous terrorists’.
So when on February 4 of this year, a jury acquitted the six defendants who had broken into the Elbit Systems warehouse of aggravated burglary and violent disorder, and failed to reach a verdict on the remaining charges, a spanner was thrown into the works of the government. 23 of the prisoners were released under strict bail conditions, a curfew, and electronic tagging.
Just days later, on February 13, the proscription of Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ organization was tenuously ruled unlawful, under very limited parameters, setting it up easily to fail on government appeal, and the arrests of citizens who showed support for it continued.
In April the Filton Six faced a retrial, and this time the allocated judge presiding over it went to extraordinary lengths to restrict what the jury could be told.
At the first trial the judge had issued contempt of court proceedings against the lead defense barrister, Rajiv Menon KC, for informing the jury in his summation that they had the right to acquit on moral conscience. So, during the retrial, five of the defendants gave their final addresses to the jury.
However, they were forbidden by the judge from justifying or even explaining their actions. They were prohibited from talking about what the arms factory Elbit did, what their drones were used for, or any relevant personal stories that had deeply affected them.
Justice Jeremy Johnson removed all defenses of lawful excuse, such as the defenses of necessity or prevention of crime. And their barristers argued in court that, by removing all defenses, the judge effectively directed the jury to convict, which a judge is expressly barred from doing, as it removes the right to a fair trial.
On May 5, the jury returned their verdicts. Four of the six were found guilty of criminal damage, one was also found guilty of GBH without intent, and two were found not guilty of all charges: Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin, having each served 18 months in jail. But in a climate where the rules of justice are so flagrantly disregarded, the accused serve sentences first and are tried afterward.
The jury had had no idea that legal defenses existed, and, moreover, was actively kept in the dark that, if they convicted, the defendants could later be sentenced as ‘terrorists’ via a backdoor piece of legislation called ‘terrorist connection’, which alters the entire landscape of their sentencing and subsequent treatment.
A total reporting restriction was also in place for all of the above until a week after the trial. The government not only fears the balanced decision-making of juries, it fears the public at large.
Over 3,000 people have been arrested merely for expressing support for Palestine Action.
On June 12, the four convicted were indeed sentenced as ‘terrorists’ due to the political dimension of the action. Perversely, whilst the political dimension that motivated the criminal damage could not be described to the jury by way of mitigation, it can be used against the defendants to sentence them post facto to far harsher punishment than the offense in itself would otherwise warrant.
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