Filton 4 sentencing exposes UK establishment's “arbitrary justice” on behalf of Israel

Justice failed in the UK today, as four Palestine Action activists received long prison sentences for direct action to prevent a genocide, with added terrorism charges not disclosed at their trial.

Supporters in Woolwich today, holding placards featuring the Filton 4. Photo via Defend Our Juries.

Today was a huge day of reckoning for the British government, for the UK judiciary, and for the very principle of justice in the UK, as four activists with Palestine Action, who took direct action, in August 2024, against a factory owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms company, to prevent their weapons being used in Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, were sentenced for causing criminal damage after a contentious retrial last month.

It was a day of reckoning in which justice failed, as the judge in the case, Mr. Justice Johnson, a judge with a long history of defending the British establishment, grafted a “terrorism connection” onto the sentencing, which was not disclosed to the jury, and was never mentioned in court, and for which he had successfully insisted on a gagging order that prevented the media from even discussing it.

Charlotte Head and Leona Kamio were given six-year sentences, minus 45 days for time served since the conviction, Fatema Zainab Rajwani was given a sentence of five years and eight months, minus 45 days, while Samuel Corner was given a sentence of eight years and eight months. All four also face “terrorist notification requirements” for 15 years after their sentences end, which will have a profound impact on their ability to live normal lives.

At the sentencing, it was also finally revealed that they had dismantled 40 deadly weapons in the space of just 20 minutes.

Ever since the activists were arrested, the Labour government led by Keir Starmer, which, by any objective measure, is slavishly devoted to protecting the State of Israel, even as it is actively engaged in a genocide, has been working with judges and other individuals within the legal system who share their enthusiasm for protecting Israel — an enthusiasm that led, last summer, to the unprecedented proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization.

Moreover, these individuals also, more widely, share a legally dangerous perception that, for far too long, the legal system has been undermined by defendants, in cases involving direct action, who have been allowed to tell the juries why they took the action that they did.

As a result, defendants in cases involving direct action have often been acquitted by jurors acting on the long-established basis of “jury equity”, whereby they have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience, irrespective of a whatever “directions” they have been given by the judge.

After holding the Filton defendants on remand for nearly a year and a half (far exceeding the legal limit), and also holding them in unnecessarily punitive conditions, which prompted some of them to undertake hunger strikes, the original six activists — the Filton 6 — were tried earlier this year, when they were acquitted by the jury of the most serious charge against them, aggravated burglary. The jurors were unable to reach a verdict on other charges, prompting the government to proceed with a retrial.

At the retrial, two of the six were cleared by the jury, but the four others were convicted of criminal damage, and one, Samuel Corner, was convicted of grievous bodily harm (GBH), but “without intent” rather than “with intent”, as the prosecution had sought to establish.

What they were not told was that the judge, Mr. Justice Johnson, who had strenuously sought to prevent the jurors from exercising “jury equity” by seeking to prevent the defendants from even mentioning why they took direct action against a factory for genocide, had plans to stealthily and autonomously graft a terrorism conviction onto the sentencing, which would conceivably double the amount of time that they would be imprisoned, and would tar them as “terrorists” for the rest of their lives.

This was a fundamentally unprecedented move, as over 50 leading UK lawyers and law professors explained in an open letter this week deploring the judge’s plans, in which they stated, “Damage to property has been a recurring feature of protest campaigns from the Suffragettes and the women of Greenham Common to Extinction Rebellion and the Trident Ploughshares movement. Military equipment has often been the target. Indeed the subject matter of the case in R v Jones, famous for Lord Hoffman’s dicta on civil disobedience, concerned extensive damage to military aircraft destined to support the invasion of Iraq. The defendants in that case were sentenced with conditional discharges.”

They added, pointedly, “It has never previously even been suggested that those taking such action should be treated as terrorists. Blurring the distinction between principled direct action and terrorism is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes.”

Richard Vogler, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Sussex, one of the leading authorities on trial by jury, and one of the signatories to the letter, later added his shocked assessment of the significance of Judge Johnson’s intent, saying, “For an offence to be characterised at sentencing in a completely different and much more serious way than it was presented to the jury on conviction, is an affront to the basic principles of criminal justice. It is hard to describe it in any other manner than as arbitrary justice.”

That “arbitrary justice”, the “hallmark of authoritarian regimes”, has now slammed down with extraordinary ferocity on four brave individuals, aged between 23 and 30, who were compelled by what they saw taking place in Gaza — a genocide — to take action to prevent it. The 40 weapons they managed to destroy in just 20 minutes were quadcopter drones of the very kind used by Israel to target and murder civilians in Gaza.

Today, justice in the UK has been horribly subverted to serve the interests of a genocidal foreign power, and the profits of its biggest arms company, and everyone involved in facilitating this brutal betrayal of the right of highly-motivated, conscience-driven people to disable weapons to be used in a genocide — a right that has been established in courtrooms on many occasions in modern British history — should be profoundly ashamed.

History will not remember these politicians and judicial figures well, even if, as I hope, this disgraceful episode is eventually overturned, either by the Court of Appeal, or by the Supreme Court.

For now, however, my thoughts — and my anger and my sorrow — are with Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio, Fatema Zainab Rajwani and Samuel Corner, who have, sickeningly and outrageously, been sacrificed on the altar of the British establishment’s subservience to a genocidal foreign power.

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