I today met our legal team and instructed them to submit an application for interim relief in the Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. If successful this will immediately lift the proscription in Scotland, pending the review.
Scores of people in Scotland face imminent conviction for terrorist offences simply for exercising free speech and expressing their opposition to the proscription. Most of these are summary cases with no jury, but up to six months imprisonment. Others face up to 14 years in jail for speeches supporting Palestine Action.
A terrorism conviction is life changing even without a prison sentence. It routinely leads to loss of employment and inability to get another job, to debanking, and to severe international travel restrictions.
Most of those facing these massively disproportionate effects are entirely respectable citizens who merely wish to oppose the facilitation of genocide.
My calculation is that submitting the application for interim relief is likely in itself to lead the Crown to drop the prosecutions for speeches, placards and T shirts. The UK government is desperate to avoid the situation of Palestine Action being legal in Scotland and not in England, with all the constitutional questions that arise.
Dropping the prosecutions would remove our main argument for interim relief (and probably make that avenure impractical for us). But this would be a huge win, removing the threat of a terrorism conviction from large numbers of peaceful campaigners in Scotland.
If the Crown does not drop the prosecutions, I am very confident our interim relief application in Scotland will succeed. In England, the High Court refused interim relief and then refused to lift the proscription pending appeal, even after it had ruled the proscription unlawful.
This nonsensical position is explained by the fact that in the English case, Judge Chamberlain as replaced at the last moment by three hand-picekd very right wing judges with a long history of finding for the government in “security” related cases. In Scotland we are not on that kind of rigged pitch.
On the original timetable the judicial review was due to start this coming Monday. It has however been postponed at least until June because the UK government is introducing “secret” evidence from intelligence that we will never be allowed to see or reply to. The veneer of democracy and human rights in the UK has worn extremely thin.
The extent of zionist domination of the UK government was shown in the astonishing decision to ban the annual al-Quds march for Palestine, which has been taking place for 47 years without incident.
The Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Sarah Sackman, called for the demonstration to be banned.
The Israeli and USA attack on Iran is, beyond argument, illegal in international law. Iran is not a proscribed organisation. It is not illegal to express support for Iran. Whether it is “anti-British” is a matter of opinion, not of law. Personally I think supporting the genocidal apartheid state of Israel is “anti-British”. But expressing an opinion is a specific legal right.
Sackman worked as a clerk in the Supreme Court of Israel. She is a fanatical zionist with a long term financing record from the zionist lobby. As “Courts minister” she has been the leading advocate for the government’s proposed abolition of many jury trials. She is behing the plans for five at a time, two and a half hour trials in England for 2,700 Palestine Action activists.
The positioning and empowerment of this zionist monstrosity is yet more evidence of how deep Israel’s tentacles run in the UK Establishment, and in Starmer’s Labout Party in particular.
Interviewed on Sky News yesterday, Sackman condemned “Iranian attacks on civilians” but refused to condemn the US bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, describing this as “the realities of war”.
We are fighting against a deeply entrenched evil. The legal campaign against the proscription of Palestine Action is a small corner of this fight, but it is essential as an assertion of our freedom to carry the fight at all.
I am afraid the full Scottish judicial review is going to be very expensive. The latest estimate we have from the legal team is a final cost of £263,000 – without going to the SUpreme Court. Of the £263,000 we have to date through all donation avenues raised a total of £189,000. We are therefore currently an estimated £74,000 short.
We need everyone who can contribute to contribute, even if it is only a pound, dollar or euro. And we need everyone who already contributed to think of another person who they can ask to contribute. All of us have to look towards people we know of good heart with means.
If we succeed, we will save many scores of people from the life-changing consequences of a terrorism sentence and from possible jail. But PLEASE do not contribute if you really cannot afford it – we are trying to make people’s lives better, not worse.
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/scottish-challenge-to-proscription/
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