Palestine Action trials show importance of juries - Yorkshire Post Letters

From: Dave Roberts, Morley, Leeds.

A trial of eight Palestine Action activists ended with the jury refusing to return guilty verdicts for seven of the eight defendants. This is not the first time that a jury has refused to go along with the State’s attempts to criminalise protest action - early this year and historically in the past.

The eight were not directly involved in the action against the Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems. They were accused of involvement in the planning of the action. The prosecutions were brought against the defendants using “joint enterprise powers”. Laws that were introduced to deal with gangland crime groups. One of the defendants was accused of giving one of the activists a lift to a DIY shop to buy equipment. Little surprise that the jury saw through the motivation of the state.

Will the state give up at this point? Recent history suggests that they will seek a retrial and not stop until they get what they want – and this at a time when we have a massive court backlog. The Government's response to all of this. Bring in ever more repressive laws and get rid of Juries hearing these cases.

Their pretext to curtailing juries is to cut the court backlog even though all organisations involved in the legal system are clear that juries did not cause the backlog and getting rid of them will not solve it either.

Of course, we all know why the Government does not like juries. When jury trials were first introduced by ‘Magna Carta’ in 1215, the primary motivation was to “limit the arbitrary powers of the monarchy” (there was no elected Parliament then). A polite way of saying to stop state repression.

Last year on International Women’s Day, women Labour MPs, led by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, paraded in suffragette colours to mark the event. I wonder if any of them felt uneasy at the hypocrisy of bringing in laws which, if retrospective, would have curtailed the suffragette’s campaign.

Of course, the activities of the suffragettes were indeed extreme and make Palestine Action look like a bunch of amateurs. It does beg the question however, if this current Government had been in power in the early part of the 20th century, would women have got the vote when they did.

Juries represent a fundamental protection against an overpowering state. Their removal potentially threatens all of us and we must resist such attempts. I wonder if the founding members of the Labour Party would be content with the actions of the current Government. I suspect not.