10 April 2007:

The Trial That Wasn't

SUMMARY

Maya Anne Evans and Milan Rai were meant to have been on trial yesterday, facing a maximum penalty of 51 weeks in prison, but the proceedings broke down in something of a judicial farce. No trial was held, and no date was fixed for it to recommence.

The sticking point was Maya and Mil's refusal to give their dates of birth to the court (as they had done in their earlier court SOCPA cases), which Judge Newton decided to treat as contempt of court, sending them to the cells for an hour, postponing the trial, and setting a date (Friday 20 April) for a new trial on the charge of contempt of court.

BACKGROUND

Maya and Mil were arrested after the 'No More Fallujahs' weekend of protest in Parliament Square last October against the occupation of Iraq. (See www.rememberfallujah.org for details of the weekend.) They were given letters inviting them to Charing Cross Police Station for interview about their part in organizing different parts of the various demonstrations, and were duly arrested and charged.

They had a hearing earlier in the year on charges of organizing and participating in unauthorised demonstrations in the restricted zone around Parliament, in contravention of the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act (2005).

In their first cases, Maya had been prosecuted and convicted of participating in an unauthorized demonstration, and Mil was prosecuted and convicted of organizing their unauthorized demonstration. This time, they were both charged with both aspects: both were organizers and both were charged with participants.

(Maya was an organizer of the event as a whole, as part of the Mass Action group. Mil was just the organizer of the name-reading which started and finished the Parliament Square/Downing Street activities.)

Having been represented by lawyers in their first (precedent-setting) cases (Maya by Bindmans, Mil by Liberty), the pair decided to represent themselves in court. This undoubtedly contributed to the crisis in court, as the magistrate would probably not have taken a similar attitude to someone represented by a solicitor.

At their first hearing at Horseferry Road, Maya and Mil had refused to give their dates of birth to the court, and had been warned by the lay magistrates that they could be punished for contempt of court. They were made to wait the entire day (in the waiting room) with their supporters (from the London Catholic Worker) before being brought back into court.

The three lay magistrates, having failed to discover any law requiring Maya and Mil to give their dates of birth, quietly left the room, and a new judge entered, who simply ignored the issue and proceeded with the hearing, registering their pleas of not guilty and then telling them to come back to trial on 10 April. (And banning them from the City of Westminster in the meantime.)

So, on 10 April, Maya and Mil came into the courtroom with their 20-plus supporters (many crowded into the back of the court as well as filling the public gallery to capacity), knowing that this might be an issue once again.

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MIL'S STORY:

A PROSECUTION BOMBSHELL

Before the trial started, the prosecution lawyer came up to me and expressed some astonishment that we had on the one hand agreed all the evidence against us from the police, but on the other had still pleaded 'not guilty'.

We'd agreed that we contacted the police in advance of the No More Fallujahs protest, that we'd notified them of what we'd been about to do, and that we'd consciously, deliberately and openly refused to apply for permission for our demonstrations/ remembrance ceremonies.

We'd removed any need for any police to attend the court case - so that we would have the maximum amount of time to call seven of the organizing committee, to give them the chance to express themselves and to affirm in a legal setting that they were organizers of an unauthorized demonstration, and were willing to be prosecuted for their actions.

So we agreed with the prosecution the statement that he was going to read out summarizing the evidence against us - just a page and a half of text, rather than an hour of police officers shuffling in and out of the witness box confirming and re-confirming what we had freely stated in taped police interviews.

We were then stunned to discover that the charge of organizing unauthorized demonstrations was being dropped. For both of us.

So the maximum penalty was no longer 51 weeks in prison, but £1000 in fines.

The seven witnesses we'd lined up were all prepared to make statements in relation to the organizer charge, and we had no way of telling them how things were changing.

Next we went to talk to the clerk of the court (they're called 'legal advisers' now), and explained the nature of our legal defence. He brushed it aside as irrelevant, and warned us not to make 'political speeches.' We said we were there to explain what happened and why.

REFUSING TO GIVE OUR DATES OF BIRTH

Then we moved to the desk next to the Crown Prosecution Service lawyer, and our 'Mackenzie friends' (unofficial legal assistants) sat behind us. People were still filing into the court from outside as Judge Newton entered.

Straight away, Judge Newton asked Maya to give her name and date of birth.

Maya said: 'My name is Maya Anne Evans. I don't wish to give my date of birth.'

The judge repeated her question several times, with increasing severity. She offered Maya the option of writing it down on a piece of paper and handing it to the clerk. She warned Maya of the consequences of being in 'contempt of court'. In England and Wales, you can be put in prison for up to a month, and/or fined £2500 for contempt of court.

And you can be sent back again and again for the same contempt of court - for the same refusal to cooperate with or obey the court.

In Wikipedia it says: 'A person found in contempt of court is called a "contemnor." To prove contempt, the prosecutor or complainant must prove the four elements of contempt. These are (1) existence of a lawful order, (2) the contemnor's knowledge of the order, (3) the contemnor's ability to comply, and (4) the contemnor's failure to comply.'

Now there may be a difference between a 'lawful order' to give your date of birth and a 'legal duty' to do so. There might not be a legal duty to give such information, but it might be lawful for the court to ask for it. Personally, I don't think so, but that's the kind of distinction that lawyers are trained/paid to fight about.

I intervened to assure the court that I was also not going to give my date of birth, that previous attempts by Horseferry Road Court to discover where it said in the law that we had to give our dates of birth had not been successful, that we'd been tried and convicted and sentenced recently without ever giving our dates of birth, and that the dates of birth entered on our court documents were simply written in by the police to complete their forms.

WHY REFUSE?

A few minutes later, I explained to the court that the reason I was not cooperating (Maya later said she felt the same) was for civil liberties reasons.

Fundamentally because of my conception of the relationship between the citizen and the state. (This may not have been the most convincing and persuasive language.)

Either the state is there (in theory) to serve the people, in which case there is no duty on us to give personal data to the state, or we are here to serve the state, in which case it has a right to all of our private information.

Later it was suggested to me by Gabriel Carlyle of Voices in the Wilderness UK that another way of putting this is that everyone has to decide where they draw the line in giving personal information to the police and courts. This (date of birth) is one place where you can draw it.

If you give your date of birth, why not give your occupation and your income (almost every case that ends in a fine ends up with questions about this)? Or your sexual orientation (something I've been asked in prison induction)?

It's important to decide for yourself where you want to draw the line, and why there. Apart from anything else, when you are in a very powerless situation, having lines that you will not cross gives some power back to you.

One basic question is whether there is a specific legal duty to give your date of birth to police officers or to courts. No one has produced such a law to me yet, in nearly twenty years of nonviolent civil disobedience, and Liberty, the human rights group, certainly has no knowledge of it.

However, both the police and the courts act as if they do have a legal power to compel you to give this information - quite wrongly, so far as I can tell.

Anyway, this is what the court hearing focused around.

A SILENT FARCE

After five minutes of the judge asking and us refusing, the clerk summoned security. This is where some elements of real theatrical farce crept in.

The panic button turned out to be on a large grey plastic hand-held device, which looked like a video game controller from the beginning of time. The clerk sat there pushing the button repeatedly and looking towards the back of the court.

Time passed.

The door opened. Instead of a security officer, it was a young peace activist in the modern version of a duffle coat.

Time passed again. Slowly. And silently. (The button being pushed repeatedly.)

The door opened again. Instead of a security officer, it was a tall, middle-aged peace activist also trying to squeeze into the back of the court to observe the proceedings.

Time passed.

Eventually a security guard appeared, had a muttered conversation with the usher ('list caller', they're now called). And disappeared again.

We continued standing in silence.

Maya whispered to me that she thought the panic button device was broken, and I had to stare hard at the floor to avoid breaking into laughter.

After an uncomfortable silence, four security officers finally burst into the courtroom, looking a bit bemused at the lack of noise and commotion. Maya and I were escorted out the back of the court into the security corridor down to the cells.

The door to the court closed behind us, and the lead security officer realised that the door to the cells in front of us was locked and he didn't have the key. For another minute we were trapped in the corridor while they banged on the doors trying to attract the attention of someone with a key.

IN THE CELLS

We were taken downstairs and processed. We had nothing on us or in our pockets, so there was no long process of registering our property (they took my 'Muslims say "Peace be upon you" ' badge). I checked that they (private security staff working for Serco) had the right to join a trade union. I got the impression that while they had the right, they hadn't actually joined a union, so at every point thereafter I pressed the case for unionization.

Maya was taken to the women's wing, I was taken to the men's wing, and we were locked up. I said aloud as the door closed: 'No blanket?' The guard said: 'No, you only get that in the police station, this is the court house.' There was also no pillow or toilet, which are standard in a police cell.

WALKING OFF FRUSTRATION

I then walked briskly around the cell humming loudly. The cell was three steps wide and one step deep (before you ran into the bed/bench). I walked for I think over half an hour, trying to avoid/ignore/transcend my feelings of frustration and uncertainty.

Around thirty people had taken time out of their schedules to come and support us - several of them to testify on our behalfs. All that effort was being nullified by this assertion of court authority, and our obstinacy. There was tremendous pressure to give in, and get on with the trial and make all those sacrifices people had made worthwhile. It was selfish of us to put our principles above their efforts.

We'd also prepared for this trial, psychologically, legally and practically. That was not exactly going to waste, but it wasn't going to be used that day. For myself, I'd also really been looking forward to being able to go into the City of Westminster once the trial was over and our bail conditions were lifted - Westminster covers Hyde Park, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square, and much of the Strand, as well as the area around Parliament. Now we were going to have to come back on another day to either finish the trial (if we did any of it today) or do the whole thing. And we'd be banned from Westminster for the duration. (I was later advised that it should be possible to get this lifted, something we're planning on looking into.)

After a long, long time of walking in circles and humming, I was calm and tired and I lay down to sleep.

THE DUTY SOLICITOR

What's really frustrating being in cells is that when you hear keys jangling in the corridor outside, your body physically reacts with hope that it is your door that is going to be opened and it is you that is going to be released. Every time the keys jangle. It is not a reaction your rational mind can turn off (or at least I've found it so).

Just as I was drifting off, the hatch in the door opened and a young Afro-Caribbean woman peered in. She was the duty solicitor, and the court had asked her to ask us if we wanted to consult her. I got up and said: 'No thank you' and then lay down again.

BACK TO COURT

Another few minutes or so later, just as I was drifting off, the door did open and I was led up to the court, meeting Maya on the way. We were both handcuffed to security guards for this short journey.

Maya later told me that when she'd arrived in the women's cell area, she'd greeted the jailer there with a cheery 'hello'. The jailer had turned to Maya's escort and asked with a frown: 'Has she really been sent from the court?'

Earlier, when we were being processed, the security guards had asked us if we'd been shouting at the magistrate, and if that was why we were being held for contempt of court. We'd said: 'No.'

THE GUARDS

All the security guards who dealt with us, except for one supervisor, were Afro-Caribbean. (When I left, later, I saw that there were a few white guards, but I never talked to them.) They seemed to me, with one exception, to be ordinary working class folk who were just trying to earn a living, rather than being people who enjoyed petty authority or lording it over 'criminals'.

We had some rapport with our guards, probably because we gave them no hostility but quite a lot of cheeriness and jokes.

When we got up to the court, we were no longer in the open area with the prosecution solicitor, but in the glassed-off dock with guards behind us. As we waited, Maya remarked on the fact that there was no toilet in the cell. I said I was really surprised by that. A guard said: 'This ain't the Hilton.' I said: 'But they have toilets in police cells.' She replied, crushingly: 'This ain't a police station.' I said to her and to the other two guards: 'But it's a hassle for you guys, having to keep taking people out of their cells to go to the toilet area. I think it's a union issue, myself.'

JUDGE NEWTON

The magistrate came back in and asked the duty solicitor to report. She said she'd offered her assistance to both us and both of us had declined.

The magistrate was not happy.

She said that she found us to be in contempt of court, and that there would be a hearing on 20 April at 8.45, and that a date would be set then for the SOCPA trial itself (if I understood her correctly).

I had been expecting us to be held in prison at least overnight, for the trial to happen the next day or as soon as possible.

Judge Newton then re-imposed our bail conditions of not being able to enter the City of Westminster until then. She asked and I confirmed that I 'understood' what she'd said.

BACK TO THE CELLS, THEN OUT

We were then taken back to the cells and locked up for another ten minutes while they did the paper work to release us. I was taken out of my cell and led to the main desk, where my badge was returned to me.

I then joined Maya out in the free world, with Gwyn Gwyntopher and other friends who'd been waiting for us in the 'waiting room' just outside. One of the guards passed through the room raising his fist and shouting: 'Fight the power!' It seemed more like a shared friendly joke than sarcasm.

THE DEMONSTRATION

We went out to the demonstration on the opposite side of the road from the court: there'd been half a dozen people there through most of the trial, handing out leaflets and holding banners ('Arrest Bush and Blair, not Mil and Maya', 'No More Fallujahs - End The Occupation').

They'd been questioned by police while we were in court/custody. Horseferry Road is the borderline of the SOCPA zone, so our friends might have been threatened with 'participating in an unauthorised demonstration'. Nothing happened to them.

Maya and I explained what had happened, so far as we could, and answered questions, and told people what we would have said in our evidence and legal arguments.

One of the last things I talked to people about was the bizarre prospect that the next hearing - for 'contempt of court' - could begin with our being asked for our names and dates of birth, and then our being locked up in the cells for a while, and us never actually ever having a trial for either the contempt of court or the SOCPA case itself.

My guess is that it will be managed in the way it was last time - a different judge will sit, and she or he will ignore the date of birth issue at the start of the procedure. The original judge(s) didn't back down, there is no erosion of court authority, but things can get done.

It's either that or endless contempt of court proceedings. (We're seeking legal representation for this hearing, by the way.)

I'm not sure people really 'got' why we'd refused to give our dates of birth, and I'm not sure what people will have taken away from the whole event. I hope that coming was good for people overall, and that the frustration and disconnectedness of the experience was overcome at the end of the afternoon by our explanations for why we were in court, and why we'd taken the stand that we had.

LAST WORDS

The very last thing I would have said in court, and I said in the speech outside court, is that the real crime being addressed by this case is the war in Iraq.

However, while I believe our actions were _legally_ reasonable and proportionate in the circumstances, and therefore that we were acting lawfully, I couldn't argue that our actions (reading the names of the dead, defying SOCPA, demonstrating outside Parliament and Downing Street) were _morally_ reasonable and proportionate.

They weren't.

They were unreasonably and disproportionately limited.

The last thing I would have said in court was that the real crime was the war, and that everyone in the court was guilty of doing too little and too late to bring the crime to an end.

But that some of us were leaving the court determined to do better, to do something to halt the US/UK assault, to prevent any more Fallujahs from happening, to prevent the risk of war against other countries in the Middle East.