Diary
A court makes vandalism 'legal'
04 July, 2010
The English legal system, one of the great glories of this country, is being politicised before our eyes. The cause is Israel, or more specifically, the pungent anti Israeli bigotry that is coursing through the veins of the English establishment.
Five ‘peace campaigners’ have just been cleared at Hove Crown Court of causing £180,000 worth of criminal damage to a factory owned by the arms manufacturer EDO MBM. The seven, who admitted causing the damage, justified their actions by saying they were designed to prevent ‘Israeli war crimes.’ At the time they smashed up the factory, Israel was engaged in Operation Cast Lead.
The jury accepted their plea of ‘lawful excuse,’ which under the Criminal Damage Act 1971, allows a small crime to be committed if it is designed to stop a much greater crime from taking place. This jury were clearly spurred on by Judge George Bathurst-Norman who said in his summing up: ‘You may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered in that time.’
All this seems extraordinary, even surreal. In itself, the plea of lawful excuse is perfectly valid. If my neighbour’s kitchen was on fire, I would feel justified in breaking down his front door to prevent his house from incineration. If the house contained explosives that could destroy an entire street, the same action would have ample legal justification.
But the case above is different because the aggressive actions of foreign states involve crimes under international, not domestic, law. Israel’s operations in Gaza may seem reprehensible to these seven protestors but the Jewish state should not be held to account in a UK court. The ‘greater wrongs’ of Cast Lead are entirely a matter of subjective judgment, and a flawed one too for they admit Hamas propaganda as fact and ignore the terror campaign against Israel’s civilians.
The campaigners had specifically argued that EDO broke export regulations by supplying military components to Israel that would be used in the occupied territories. However, an independent information watchdog has said this claim is not confirmed by official records
But what has happened in this case is even more extraordinary. An ‘impartial’ judge has adopted a pro Palestinian viewpoint and then imposed it on the members of a jury, effectively predetermining the outcome of this case. This violates the entire spirit of the judicial process, at least in a functioning and mature democracy. It makes a mockery of the English legal system.
The jury also accepted the excuse given by Caroline Lucas, Parliament’s sole Green MP, that the campaigners had exhausted ‘all democratic avenues’ prior to their binge of violence. One supporter of the ‘smash EDO campaign’ put it this way: ‘The bitter experience of seeing millions of people demonstrate against the Iraq war, only for the Government to carry on regardless, inspired a redrawing of the rules of engagement.’
Of course, it this became a standard legal defence, it would be a recipe for judicial anarchy. Self styled peace campaigners could choose their favourite foreign policy bugbears (Palestine would be no. 1 naturally) and claim that because they had been unable to stop some alleged abuse from taking place, they had no choice but to resort to violent intimidation. This would require juries to decide which foreign policies constituted ‘the greater evil’ required by this legal defence, which is a wholly inappropriate power.
In this case, Israel’s perceived misdeeds have given the perfect cover for reckless and criminal behaviour. That an English law court should be complicit with such vandalism is outrageous and a very worrying sign of our times.
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