‘With an efficient sledgehammer in your hand, you can cause quite a bit of damage!’ So says Palestine Action’s Underground Manual, extracts from which were published by the Court of Appeal on Monday.
Just how much damage the weapon could cause in the hands of a Palestine Action activist became clear last Friday, when an impact statement from Police Sergeant Kate Evans was read out at a sentencing hearing.
‘Without any warning or provocation, Sam Corner struck me from behind with a sledgehammer,’ she said. ‘I was facing away from him and posed no threat at the time of the attack.’
Evans had been called to a break-in at an Israeli-owned military technology factory near Bristol when Corner attacked her, breaking her spine. ‘There was no sign of shock or regret from him,’ she told the court, ‘only attempts to justify his actions with baseless and offensive claims that I was complicit in genocide.’ The incident, she added, had affected her physical health, mental wellbeing, confidence, career and family life.
‘At no stage has Palestine Action suggested that its terrorist activities were either a mistake or an aberration,’ five senior appeal judges noted in the judgment they delivered on Monday. ‘Rather, Palestine Action has lauded those who took part. The contents of the Underground Manual provide good evidence of Palestine Action’s continuing intention to promote the use of violence regardless of the risk that this will result in serious damage to property or serious violence against members of the public.’
Why, then, have so many decent, thoughtful people shown support for what the Court of Appeal found to be ‘a covert organisation that operates using secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties’? What do they think their support will achieve?
Corner – who also swung his sledgehammer towards an injured security guard, narrowly missing him – has an autistic spectrum condition. But does that explain why he believes that an innocent police officer is complicit in genocide? Does he even know what the word means?
More than 3,000 people have been arrested after holding up signs saying ‘I oppose genocide’. But don’t we all? I certainly do.
If that was all they had said, these virtue-signallers would not now be facing prosecution under section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000. That makes it an offence for anyone to carry an article in a public place ‘in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation’. As instructed, they wrote ‘I support Palestine Action’ on their placards – which seems to fit the charge nicely. If they had left off the last word, they would have been acting entirely lawfully.
Charges under section 13 can be tried only in the magistrates’ courts. Though prison is an option, it seems unlikely if offenders comply with fines and community orders. And perhaps they have no wish to enter countries that ask visitors to declare any terrorism convictions or cautions.
More than 700 prosecutions are already pending. If many defendants plead not guilty, that will add to the pressures facing the criminal justice system. I have always wondered whether that was at the back of Dame Victoria Sharp’s mind when her court declared the home secretary’s ban on Palestine Action unlawful in February.
Sharp is well regarded by other judges, particularly those needing a quiet word of advice. But she has limited experience of judicial review and the judgment she delivered in the High Court failed to persuade those more familiar with public law.
So when her decision was overturned this week by a five-judge appeal court, the only person who professed surprise was Huda Ammori, the claimant. Palestine Action’s co-founder says she will seek to appeal. I would be amazed if she were granted permission and astonished if the Supreme Court found in her favour.
Explaining why the High Court should not have quashed the ban, the lady chief justice said Yvette Cooper had been ‘fully entitled to take into account the operational benefits of proscription’. The then home secretary had not disregarded her published proscription policy, such as it was.
In deciding whether the ban was proportionate, Sharp had followed the four-stage test in Bank Mellat, decided by the Supreme Court in 2013. She thought the balance favoured the claimants.
Applying the same test in the Court of Appeal, though, Baroness Carr and her colleagues concluded that protesters’ rights to free speech were outweighed by Palestine Action’s terrorist activities. The home secretary had both the institutional competence and the democratic accountability to order the ban, they concluded.
We are all safer as a result – including the ‘many otherwise law-abiding citizens’ who have supported a group that promotes unlawful violence.
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