Elbit Six: Palestine activists who shut down factory could face fresh trial
Posted: 17th January 2024
Six Palestine Action activists find out tomorrow whether they will face a fresh trial over the shutdown of an Israeli-linked arms factory.
Jurors at Snaresbrook Crown Court acquitted the group of a total of 12 charges in December, but failed to reach a decision on 23 others. They were accused of criminal offences relating to direct action targeting the UK operations of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms company.
Genevieve Scherer and Jocelyn Cooney were acquitted in December for all of the offences they had been charged with. Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, was found guilty of one count of criminal damage. The jury failed to reach a decision on a majority of the other charges.
The group, originally known as the ‘Elbit Eight’ – now the ‘Elbit Six’ – had been on trial at the end of last year for various combinations of 13 counts relating to a series of protests in London, Kent, Oldham and Staffordshire. They will find out on Thursday whether the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) intends to repeat the trial in the hope of getting a verdict for the remaining counts.
Lydia Dagostino, the group’s solicitor and director at Kellys Solicitors, pointed to the backlog in British courts as a likely cause of further delays should a fresh trial go ahead.
“We’re looking at probably spring or summer 2025 [if there is a retrial],” she said. “Some of these incidents date back to 2020, so that’s five years. Broadly speaking, the retrial isn’t really a priority [for the court], but it has a massive impact on defendants and witnesses.”
Milly Arnott, who stood trial with the group last year, added: “I did these direct actions when I had just turned 27. I’m now 30. By the time I get to my retrial, I will be nearly 32. I never anticipated just how long I would be wound up in this whole legal process when I was first arrested.
“It’s another form of punishment for defendants – the pre-trial punishment of waiting around, the psychological burden of not knowing what’s going to happen.”
She said the long wait was a result of “over a decade of austerity-led cuts across all of the public sector including the courts”.
The Ministry of Justice, responsible for the court system, has been hit hard by cuts to its departmental budget. Last year, the president of the Law Society, Nick Emmerson, said the justice system was “crying out for investment” as he warned against further cuts amid a growing backlog of cases.
Arnott described the wait for a potential retrial as a “form of psychological warfare on defendants, because it’s another year and a half where we can’t progress with our life – you can’t make long-term decisions, or get jobs. The consequences go way beyond just waiting for this trial.”
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Dagostino agreed and added that the backlog within the criminal justice system has been brought about by “chronic underfunding for a very long time” as well as more recent events including the Covid-19 pandemic and the barristers strike.
“This trial was around six weeks,” she said. “It’s an exhausting process and the prospect of going through that again, for many defendants, is really daunting.
“If you look at it like surgery, it’s like having one major operation and then being told you’ve got to have another one. Just because you’ve been through that pain and you know what to expect, it doesn’t mean it’s any easier.”
Huda Ammori, the co-founder of Palestine Action, who was also on trial, told openDemocracy she feels “certain of the government and the state’s intentions”.
“I think it’s all in an attempt to try and deter people from taking direct action,” she said. “But the only thing that is going to deter people from taking direct action is British complicity ending.
“When people see what’s going on in Palestine, these tactics [by prosecutors] aren’t going to work. Often, repression just brings on more support to our fight.
“I think the UK government is invested in trying to prosecute us.
“When you’re part of a movement like this, it just becomes part of your life waiting for these court results. I try not to let it affect me. [If there is a retrial] I see it as another opportunity to expose Elbit Systems and to bring to light their crimes to another jury.”
Ammori and Arnott also expressed concern about the defences that will be available to them if there is a retrial.
Before the trial began, a number of defences – including the position that their actions were necessary, and the position that they had been acting to preserve life – were ruled out by the judge. This meant that the only defence available to them was what is known as consent: they argued that, if the owners of the buildings of Elbit and UAV Tactical Systems – an Israeli-French drone company part-owned by Elbit – had all the information, and understood the extent of the devastation caused by Elbit’s weapons, then they would have consented to the group’s actions.
Now, the consent defence too is under threat: the attorney general asked the Court of Appeal last month to consider whether it should be available to defendants in future. The defence has successfully been used by climate activists as well. The court of appeal is yet to reach a decision but Dagostino warned that it could “limit the scope even further on availability of defences for activists”.
“We’ve already seen in the climate change cases that the courts have been really unusually ruling out defences before a jury is even sworn,” she said.
“And then judges are restricting what the defendants can tell jurors about their motivations for taking the actions they did, and in some cases, even suggesting that they might be in contempt of court for talking about, for example, the climate emergency.”