Weer
eens een staaltje ongelofelijk maar waar: de 15 activisten die op 28
maart 2017 verhinderden dat een vliegtuig voor deportatie van
vluchtelingen kon opstijgen van de Britse luchthaven Stansted, zijn aangeklaagd voor terrorisme...... De Stansted 15, zoals deze mensenrechtenactivisten sindsdien worden genoemd, zijn mensen uit 3 verschillende vreedzame actiegroepen, t.w.: End Deportations, Plane Stupid en Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants.
De
Stansted 15 hebben
geen geweld gebruikt en blijkbaar vindt men een dergelijke geweldloze actie in Groot-Brittannië een daad van terreur....... Waar deze groep zou moeten worden geprezen voor de juiste, niet gewelddadige inzet!
De deportaties vinden plaats zonder enig toezicht van mensenrechtenorganisaties en te vrezen valt dat mensen met grof geweld worden uitgezet, zeker gezien de voorbeelden uit het verleden (overigens ook door onze overheid....). De veiligheidsbeambten die de vluchtelingen vanuit GB begeleiden staan bekend om het gebruik van grof geweld...... Om de publieke opinie niet tegen zich te krijgen zorgt de Britse overheid ervoor dat de deportaties van vluchtelingen altijd midden in de nacht plaatsvinden.......
Niet alleen in Groot-Brittannië, maar overal
worden de strafeisen en straffen van dit soort activisme opgeschroefd, echter dit slaat wel alles van wat we hebben meegemaakt, althans in de westerse wereld.........
Te vrezen valt dan ook dat na het uitspreken van de straf op 4
februari 2019, men ook elders nog zwaarder zal gaan straffen.......
Het zal
toeval zijn, maar het is wel opvallend dat de strafeis tegen de Stansted 15 net na het meer dan lamme overleg in Marrakech over 'de vluchtelingencrisis' werd
uitgesproken, een overleg wat leidde tot het volkomen overbodige Marrakech pact...... Een pact waar geen rechten aan kunnen worden ontleend, maar
waarbij men weer eens publiekelijk de handen in het bloed van
duizenden omgekomen vluchtelingen heeft gewassen.......
Daar er in het Marrakech pact een aantal keren werd gesproken over het tegengaan van vluchtelingenstromen, is de kans levensgroot dat regeringen zich achter dit pact zullen verschuilen, als zij weigeren vluchtelingen op te nemen........
Nergens in het Marrakech pact wordt gesproken over het tegengaan van vluchtelingenstromen, door westerse landen te veroordelen die illegaal oorlog voeren tegen landen in het Midden-Oosten en Noord-Afrika, oorlogen geleid door de VS met hulp van haar NAVO partners, waar de VS in feite het opperbevel heeft over diezelfde NAVO........
Intussen
stuurt men mensen terug die grote kans lopen vermoord te worden,
zoals een lesbische vrouw, wiens man al heeft gezegd haar te zullen
opwachten na deportatie, hoogstwaarschijnlijk om haar te
vermoorden......... Om nog maar te zwijgen over de vluchtelingen die teruggestuurd worden naar Afghanistan en Irak, omdat Buitenlandse Zaken met rammelende rapporten (ambtsberichten) komt die stellen dat men veilig is in die landen.......
De verantwoordelijken voor illegale oorlogen die vluchtelingenstromen op gang brachten en brengen, die bovendien het gore lef hebben vluchtelingen te weigeren, zouden terecht moeten staan wegens ernstige mensenrechtenschendingen
en het moedwillig in levensgevaar brengen van mensen........ Verantwoordelijken van landen die in feite direct schuldig zijn aan de dood van de vele duizenden die in de Middellandse Zee en de Egeïsche Zee zijn verdronken! Zoals je al had begrepen zijn de verantwoordelijken voor de enorme vluchtelingenstromen de VS en andere NAVO-lidstaten (inclusief Turkije), met hulp van Saoedi-Arabië, de Golfstaten, Egypte en Marokko.
De hoogste tijd dat het Internationaal Strafhof wordt uitgebreid en zich meer gaat roeren in de media met beschuldigingen aan het adres van bijvoorbeeld de VS en de andere NAVO-lidstaten!
Hoe is het mogelijk dat mensen die zich inzetten voor mensenrechten en die de dood van vluchtelingen willen voorkomen, worden aangeklaagd door het Britse openbaar ministerie, een ministerie dat tegelijkertijd geen actie onderneemt tegen het elders illegaal oorlogvoeren (één van de ergste vormen van terreur!) door haar eigen overheid, waardoor alleen deze eeuw al 2,5 miljoen mensen zijn vermoord.......
De wereld alweer totaal op de kop!!
ACTIVISTS WHO STOPPED DEPORTATION FLIGHT CONVICTED OF TERRORISM CHARGE, FACE LIFE IN PRISON
DECEMBER
11, 2018 FRIENDS
OF GREED 3
ACTIVISM, DEPORTATION, IMMIGRATION, NM, STANSTED
15,TERRORISM, UNITED
KINGDOM
United
Kingdom (NM) – A
group of 15 activists who prevented a deportation charter flight from
leaving Stansted airport by locking themselves together around the
aeroplane have been found guilty of a terrorist offence.
The
so-called Stansted 15 spent nine weeks on trial charged with an
offence that has never been used before in response to a non-violent
direct action and carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
They
were convicted by a jury at Chelmsford Crown Court on Monday 10
December and will be sentenced on 4 February 2019.
Ben
Smoke, who was arrested after being cut away from the front wheel of
the aeroplane, said the guilty verdict would have “huge
ramifications on the ability of people to engage in what is a very
long tradition of direct action in this country”.
The
27-year-old told Novara Media:
“I’m obviously terrified for myself, terrified for what the future holds, but more than that I’m terrified about how we carry on fighting a government that just won’t listen, how we carry on fighting a government that has been proven to be so disgusting and despicable every way you turn.
“You look at the UN report that came out recently that said that austerity is a choice, they have made a choice to kill 120,000 people, if we’re in a situation where we can’t fight that how do we go on? How do we carry on? How do we change our society?”
The
activists, from campaign group End
Deportations,
were originally charged with criminal damage and aggravated trespass
after the action on 28 March 2017, offences too small to warrant
trial by jury and carrying a maximum of just three months in prison.
The prosecution later sought special permission to add an additional
charge of “endangering safety at an aerodrome”, a terrorism
offence created in response to the 1988
Lockerbie bombing,
in which 270 people died.
They
stood accused of putting the safety of the airport and passengers at
risk and causing serious disruption to international air travel for
taking part in the non-violent direct action, in a move Amnesty
International described as
“using a sledgehammer to crack a nut”. The human rights
organisation, which observed the trial for its duration, was
concerned that the severe and unprecedented charge may have been
brought in order to discourage other activists from taking
non-violent direct action in defence of human rights.
Labour’s
Shadow Attorney General Shami Chakrabarti condemned the verdict on
Monday, pointing out that it coincided with the 70th anniversary
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“What
a sad International Human Rights day, when non-violent protestors are
prosecuted for defending the Refugee Convention, and are treated like
terrorists,” she said . “Labour in Government will review the
statute book to better guarantee the right to peaceful dissent.”
Smoke
said he believed the verdict could violate “the contract of
our democracy” by obstructing channels that should be available for
everyone to demand change.
He
referenced the harsh sentences given to the suffragettes when they
used direct action to challenge laws preventing women from voting in
the early 20th century and said he feared the outcome of the Stansted
15 trial would have the same deterrent effect. “These people
are people who were denigrated at the time and now are being heralded
as heroes,” he said. “I’m not for a second trying to put us in
that category but what they then experienced… imprisonment and
being force fed, really, really meant that it became a harder thing
to do to take a direct action to try and change the society you live
in and to try and make society better… that’s what I’m
terrified of seeing coming out of this action.”
Wearing
pink bobble hats, hi-vis vests and jumpers emblazoned with the words
“mass deportations kill, no one is illegal”, the coalition of
activists from End Deportations, Plane
Stupid and Lesbians
and Gays Support the Migrants,
chained themselves to a plane set to deport 60 people to West Africa
on 28 March 2017 and stopped it from taking off.
In
protesting against the injustices of the UK border and immigration
system, the group focused their efforts specifically on the issue of
mass deportation charter flights on account of the flights being the
hardest form of deportation to individually resist. End Deportations
campaigners argue
that the flights were
introduced by the government for that very reason.
Activist
Helen Brewer explained that the group spent months considering
the best and safest way to blockade the flight. “After coaches
arrive from detention centres they go into a private car park,” she
said, “then you have the crew coming down from their hangar to
ready the plane. So [we knew we had to act] before the coaches drive
from the car park to the plane to board people… So that’s what we
did.”
Strategically,
Brewer said, it made sense to target the aeroplane itself because
people may be taken from all over the country to be deported on a
charter flight, “but there’s only one plane”.
Deportations
used to take place on regular commercial flights. But when passengers
and pilots started to object on moral and political grounds, the Home
Office changed tack and begun chartering deportee-only planes.
Shrouded
in secrecy, these planes leave from undisclosed locations in the
middle of the night. By doing this, they are more insulated from
public opinion and the kind of reputational pressures that
caused Virgin
Airlines to announce it
would no longer assist the Home Office with forced deportations.
Notorious
for their violence,
the only people on the flights are deportees and security guards.
With no independent monitoring or documentation of what takes place
on the way to the airport, during the flight or after landing, deaths
in transitare not unknown.
At
the heart of the group’s decision to take action was the desire to
protect vulnerable people from the myriad violences of the UK border
regime.
In
her closing statement, Mel Evans, one of the defendants who
represented herself throughout the trial, said about the action:
“This was never about politics. It was always about people. We wanted people to be safe… And now some of them are safe, and they’re able to be with their families and be with the people they love. And that’s all we were trying to do.”
One
manifestation of this violence is in the way the flights themselves
are enacted. Chains and restraints are commonly used to subdue
passengers, sometimes even fatally. In 2010, 46-year-old Jimmy
Mubenga died of suffocation after
being pinned down in his seat by G4S security guards, despite already
being handcuffed from behind with his seatbelt on.
Beyond
the immediate danger of being on the plane, there is also the issue
of the potential further violence awaiting passengers when they
arrive in the country they are being deported to. Addressing the
jury, Evans read the testimony of one of the passengers on the
flight:
“[There] was a lesbian woman who was terrified of what would happen if she saw her ex-husband: ‘[He] said he knows I am being deported next week. He is waiting for me. He is planning to kill me. I don’t want to go on that plane. I can’t go. I am begging.’”
But
this is far from an isolated incident. According to Brewer, “a
deportation happened on Tuesday to Nigeria and Ghana. This was one
flight we stopped out of thousands.” Using this logic, each of
these individual acts of violence is connected – part of what Luke
de Noronha, a spokesperson
for the End Deportations campaign, described
as “the
architecture of racialised border violence”.
‘WITHOUT THEIR ACTIONS I WOULD HAVE MISSED MY DAUGHTER’S BIRTH’
Out
of the 60 people set to be deported on the flight, 11 are still in
the UK as a result of the action. Two out of those 11 now have
indefinite leave to remain and four have been referred to the
National Referral Unit For Human Trafficking. Five are still waiting
for their appeals to be heard.
Kevin*,
one of the passengers on the flight, was set to be deported to Ghana
where he lived up until his late teens. He has since been
granted leave to remain.
As
a young child, Kevin was left in the care of his abusive father after
his mother moved to England, but once he had finished school in the
mid 2000s, he was finally able to join her in London.
In
the UK he successfully applied for indefinite leave to remain.
However, this was revoked after he received a criminal conviction. As
a result of the loss of his immigration status, he faced deportation
and with it, the prospect of being forced to leave behind his
elderly mother, pregnant partner and children.
For
Kevin, the impact of the action was life-changing. He said:
“For me a crime is doing something that is evil, shameful or just wrong – and it’s clear that it is the actions of the Home Office that tick all of these boxes. The Stansted 15 were trying to stop the real crime being committed.
“Without their actions I would have missed my daughter’s birth, and faced the utter injustice of being deported from this country without having my [now successful] appeal heard.
“My message to them today is to fight on. Your cause is just and history will absolve you of the guilt that the system has marked you with.”
Indeed,
current government policy is widely known as ‘deport first, appeal
later’. An asylum decision-maker for the Home Office
recently described
the process as
a “lottery” in which “pushy managers [tried to drive] results
through fear and intimidation.”
‘EVERYDAY IS A FIGHT IN THE COURTROOM’
The
nine week trial began on 1 October 2018 at Chelmsford Crown Court in
Essex, during which seven of the 15 gave evidence. Despite
allowing the defendants to give their political reasons for the
action during the trial, Judge
Christopher Morgan ruled that
they could not rely on the defence that they acted to stop human
rights abuses. However, one of the lawyers for the defence, Mr
Wainwright, described
them as
having “a real and genuine concern for the sanctity of human life”.
Throughout
the trial, the prosecution repeatedly deployed anti-immigration
rhetoric in
discussing the case. A “fence” became “a protective membrane”
– there to stop unknown foreign bodies from passing through. While,
in his closing speech, lawyer for the prosecution Tony Badenoch QC
repeatedly referred to the activists as a “swarm” – a
denigrative metaphor routinely deployed by right
wing media and politicians in
the migration debate.
Listening
to the prosecution without being able to defend themselves was a
constant source of frustration for the group. Speaking to Novara
Media shortly before the trial ended, Brewer said:
“We have to be in court usually from ten until four everyday, in a windowless courtroom, under fluorescent lights, sitting silently in the dock. [We] can’t speak except through [our] barristers and [we] have to listen to someone talk about [us] and…what we did and interrogate that and really smear that and present to the jury something that most of us completely disagree with. It’s hard. And it’s hard when you’re constantly battling; everyday is a fight in the courtroom.”
Following
Morgan’s summing up on 4 December, the
Guardian has
reported that barristers defending the 15 argued the jury should be
discharged because the judge’s final words were so severe they
amounted to a direction to convict.
The
length of the trial, combined with the threat of life in prison, has
had a negative impact on the mental and emotional health of the
group.
Activist
Laura Clayson said she had been prescribed anti-anxiety medication as
a result of the stress of the trial. “Given that it’s been
nearly 19 months since we took action, 15 since the charge was
escalated to endangerment, and we have only just come out the other
side of the trial, I haven’t even begun to be able to start
processing or unpacking it,” she said. “Living with such
uncertainty and precarity makes life incredibly difficult and it has
been hard to function normally, to think ahead or plan anything. The
trial has always been there, looming over us.”
they found us guilty. we'll get sentenced 4th february. we're reeling.. but whatever they do to us, it will never be as bad as the suffering the home office inflict on people every single day. we will keep fighting in solidarity with those people.
The
15 activists intend to fight the conviction. In a statement released
after the verdict was announced the group said:
“We are guilty of nothing more than intervening to prevent harm. The real crime is the government’s cowardly, inhumane and barely legal deportation flights and the unprecedented use of terror law to crack down on peaceful protest. We must challenge this shocking use of draconian legislation, and continue to demand an immediate end to these secretive deportation charter flights and a full independent public inquiry into the government’s ‘hostile environment’.”
“Justice will not be done until we are exonerated and the Home Office is held to account for the danger it puts people in every single day. It endangers people in dawn raids on their homes, at detention centres and on these brutal flights. The system is out of control. It is unfair, unjust and unlawful and it must be stopped.”
The
guilty verdict marks a huge blow to the landscape of UK activism at a
time when there has been a concerted effort to clamp down on the
right to protest. From today’s guilty verdict, which itself was
only made possible by the use of an unprecedented terrorism charge,
to the jailing of the so-called Frack
Free Fourearlier
in the year, the future of non-violent direct action in the UK
is far from certain.
Kate
Allen, Amnesty International UK’s Director said:
“It’s deeply disturbing that peaceful protesters who caused disruption but at no time caused harm to anyone, should now be facing a possible lengthy prison sentence. This whole case will send a shiver down the spine of anyone who cares about the right to protest in our country. Around the world, human rights defenders are coming under increasing attack. The UK should not be bringing such severe charges against those who seek to peacefully stand up for human rights.”
Meanwhile,
the End Deportations campaign will continue its fight to abolish
deportations and detention centres and end the violence of the UK
border regime.
In
November, women in Yarl’s Wood detention centre again went
on hunger
strike to
protest against their indefinite detention, describing the experience
of living in Britain’s only female detention centre as a form of
“hell”. It is clear that activists like the Stansted 15 are vital
in resisting the UK border regime alongside those who feel the full
force of its violence.
*Identifying
details have been changed to protect anonymity
This
report prepared by Beth Perkin for Novara
Media
