Under-fire judge live-streams ruling in “show trial” of Filton 25 over destruction of weapons bound for Gaza genocide

• Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani have today been sentenced with a terrorism connection applied, despite never facing terrorism charges
• Charlotte Head and Leona Kamio were sentenced to 6 years less 45 days; Fatema Zainab Rajwani to 5 years 8 months less 45 days; Samuel Corner to a combined 8 years 8 months. All four face 15-year terrorist notification requirements
• The terrorism designation was hidden from the jury throughout both trials - they convicted the four of criminal damage with no knowledge that a terrorism sentence could follow
• It has today been revealed that the defendants dismantled 40 weapons in 20 minutes - the full scale of their action, suppressed throughout both trials, now on the public record
• Mr Justice Johnson, who presided over both trials, refused to recuse himself despite a career spent defending MI5, MI6, the Ministry of Defence and police forces - the very institutions whose interests this prosecution served
• Over 2,100 members of the public emailed into the court demanding Johnson recuse himself from the case - which Johnson himself acknowledged, but he requested not to see them
• Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin were acquitted of all charges at retrial

London — At today's sentencing of the Filton four, Mr Justice Johnson dressed an unprecedented, politically engineered outcome in the language of proportionality, regret and judicial duty - a masterclass in rhetorical misdirection. Four activists were branded terrorists for fulfilling an obligation international law places on us all, solemn acknowledgements of their sincerity paired with sentences that ensured exactly that outcome. The performance does not change what was done in that courtroom. Their conviction last month, and the sentence handed down today, were engineered by blindsiding jurors about the state's intent to prosecute them as terrorists - after an initial trial failed to produce the convictions the state required.

This was made possible by two decades of counter-terrorism powers, built on exploiting fear and prejudice against Muslims, now being deployed to strip away the rights of anyone who dares resist a genocide.

Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani fulfilled a moral duty. The Genocide Convention is unambiguous in mandating states to prevent genocide. As Britain was complicit, these heroic activists sought to end this complicity.

In twenty minutes, the four dismantled forty weapons - quadcopters produced by Elbit Systems and deployed in Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Two trials were constructed around the damage they caused. The jury that convicted them did so largely in the dark, having been banned - under threat of contempt - from hearing any of that context. They were not told that the verdict they delivered could be used to sentence four people as terrorists. That information had to be disclosed by an MP under parliamentary privilege because no journalist in Britain could legally print it.

The judge who applied the terrorism designation today is the same man who spent his legal career defending the institutions whose interests this prosecution served. Mr Justice Johnson - barrister for MI6, the Ministry of Defence, West Midlands Police at Hillsborough, and advocate for the legal authorisation of undercover officers in sexual relationships with protesters - refused to recuse himself from a case that put the British security state on trial. This is despite 2,100 emails being sent to the court via our campaign, calling for Johnson to recuse himself. Johnson himself acknowledged the receipt of these emails, but requested not to see them. He stripped the defendants of their legal defences, banned genocide from the courtroom, and presided over a process in which the full truth of what the defendants did, and why, was systematically withheld from the people asked to judge them.

Every restriction imposed by the court worked toward the same end: a jury that knew only the narrowest possible facts, asked to answer only the narrowest possible question. They were told a crime had occurred. They were not told why. They were not told what Elbit Systems makes, or where its weapons go, or what those weapons have done. They were not told that the defendants had spent years pursuing every other avenue available to them. And they were never told - the single fact that would have transformed their understanding of what they were being asked to decide - that a guilty verdict could see four people sentenced as terrorists. A jury cannot deliver a fair verdict on a case it has been deliberately prevented from understanding.

This is a persecution. It has been conducted at the behest of a genocidal state and in protection of its commercial interests on British soil. Elbit Systems has lobbied the Home Office, met with the Attorney General's Office, and coordinated with the Israeli Embassy on the prosecution of Palestine Action activists. The defendants who dismantled its weapons have been imprisoned, retrialled and now sentenced as terrorists. The company whose products they dismantled has faced nothing.

Anas Mustapha, Head of Public Advocacy at CAGE, said:

"Today four people have been sentenced as terrorists for fulfilling the moral duty to prevent a genocide. This is the War on Terror doing what it was always designed to do - not fighting terrorism, but manufacturing it, stretching the label onto whoever the state needs it to fit. Two decades ago that meant Muslims detained without charge, rendered, tortured. Today it means four people who dismantled weapons bound for a genocide. The Genocide Convention does not make an exception for inconvenient states - when governments fail to prevent genocide, that obligation passes to individuals, and these four accepted it. The architecture that sentenced them as terrorists is the same architecture built in the years after 9/11. It was always going to come for people like this. These laws were never about safety. They must be abolished."

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