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.
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 bookhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgp5k0ex1zo
Just 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. I figured it was their real name because of the capitalization