Volunteers entering the Southampton Magistrates Court
A district judge has found that the non-violent actions of the 'Marchwood 14' were illegal, but the Attorney General's advice - which could have proved the war on Iraq was illegal - was irrelevant to the case.
We will appeal the verdict.
Handing down his ruling, District Judge John Woollard said he was "satisfied that the defendants each intended their actions on the 4th February [2003] to be acts of peaceful 'direct action', to express their considered and genuinely held belief that .. the actions of the Government in preparing for possible military action against Iraq was [sic] morally and legally wrong".
The 14 volunteers were charged with Aggravated Trespass after they occupied tanks at Marchwood military base in the run-up to war last year. The charge relates to obstructing or disrupting a 'lawful activity'. Our lawyers claimed the Attorney's advice could show that the Government thought war was illegal when the protest took place. But DJ Woollard ruled the advice should be kept secret.
During the course of the trial, he also ruled that a former Foreign Office official Elizabeth Wilmhurst should not be summoned to court to give evidence. As former Deputy Legal Advisor at the Foreign Office she was in a position to reveal how the Government viewed the legality of the war when the protest took place.
DJ Woollard dismissed our claims that the war was an unlawful activity without actually examining the question. "The dockworkers and others were employed by the Ministry of Defence to load ships with military cargoes, and that is what they were doing," he said. "That is all the Crown has to prove."
Our lawyers argued that the defendants were impelled to act as they did because they had good cause to fear that otherwise death or serious physical injury would result. The judge rejected this defence of "necessity" on the grounds that the defendants were not 'impelled' by 'fear' but 'chose to act' in the way they did.
The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case against GCHQ whistleblower Katherine Gun because it "could not disprove" this defence. Ms Gun's trial was due to be heard in front of a jury, while the Greenpeace volunteers faced a District Judge. The Judge had earlier refused to order a witness summons against the former senior civil servant, despite indications that she would not resist a summons.
One of the defendants, Graham Thompson, said: "Over the past year we've seen chaos in Iraq, an increased threat of terror, no banned weapons and a host of evidence that Blair was either negligent or lying, yet it's the protesters who have been punished. The top people in this country got it seriously wrong on Iraq, but not a single person has lost their job or faced charges. The guilty people are Tony Blair and Jack Straw."
Our legal team is preparing an appeal on the grounds that we were denied a fair trial. We are yet to be persuaded that the illegality of the war was irrelevant.
"While the truth behind the build up to war remained secret we couldn't get a fair trial," Thompson said. "But Mr Blair should expect us back in a higher court, seeking the documents that could over-turn this conviction. This isn't going to go away, we won't let it."
