The Filton Gag Order Just Lifted. Look What The Judge Was Hiding From The Jury

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:01]Right. So on the 12th of May, the reporting restrictions came off the Filton case. Finally, what was sitting underneath them has finally been allowed into public view. Mr. Justice Johnson, sitting in the Crown Court, made a ruling back in March of last year before the first trial of the Palestine Action defendants had even begun that there appeared to be a terrorist connection to what they did at the Elbert Systems Factory in Filton near Bristol in August 2024. And that ruling was kept from the jury in the first trial and it was also kept from the jury in the second trial.

[00:00:33]And it's been kept from the public until now. Two juries sat through that case.

[00:00:38]You have to bear in mind. The first cleared the defendants of aggravated burglary and failed to reach verdicts on criminal damage. And the second convicted for of criminal damage while still being kept away from the terrorism consequence Johnson had already ruled appeared to sit beside the case. Four of them, Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Cameo, and Fatamea Rajuani were convicted of criminal damage on the 5th of May. Samuel Corner was also convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent and cleared of GBH with intent. And two others, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Develin, were acquitted of criminal damage despite having admitted to doing that.

[00:01:14]So, fathom that one out. Yet all six had already been cleared of aggravated burglary at the earlier trial where the jury could not reach verdicts on the criminal damage charge. Sentencing is provisionally listed for the 12th of June at Woolage Crown Court and the four convicted are now remanded in custody until that date. The mechanism Johnson is expected to use is section 69 of the sentencing act of 2020. Now section 69 is not a terrorism charge. It is not anything the jury sees either. It's an aggravating factor that's applied at sentencing by the judge alone after conviction on an offense that has nothing to do with terrorism on its face. The sentencing council guidance is explicit about how this works. Any offense punishable on indictment by more than two years imprisonment can be deemed to have a terrorist connection unless it is specifically excluded.

[00:02:07]Criminal damage at scale clears that threshold without breaking a sweat. The parliamentary explanatory notes from the 2021 bill that widened the pro the provision makes that equally explicit.

[00:02:19]Any non-terrorism offense over the 2-year ceiling can now carry a terrorism connection finding. And during the Lord's debate in March of 2021, Piers warned in plain language that this would allow a jury to convict somebody of a basic offense while a judge later added a terrorist connection at sentencing without the jury ever knowing it was on the table. And that warning was made on the record 5 years ago by parliamentarians who saw exactly where this was going. And they were told it would be used sparingly. They were told it would be used in extremists. And here we are with the first major test of the provision being applied to four people who broke into an Israeli weapons factory. What Johnson actually said when he made his ruling was that damaging property destined for the Israeli government could influence the Israeli government. That's the test he applied.

[00:03:07]That was the bar. He accepted that one of the motivating factors was the destruction of weapons and the saving of lives in Gaza. He accepted it on the record, but he said another purpose could be damaging property to influence the Israeli government, and that could be enough to bring section 69 into play.

[00:03:24]I'll put it another way. The argument is that damaging weapons equipment that's linked to a foreign state, equipment the defense wanted to connect to Israel's genocide in Gaza, now sitting inside a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, can be treated as an act with a terrorist connection because it might cause that foreign state to behave differently. Apparently, despite Israel's actions, that could be a bad thing, judicially speaking. So, the logical reach of that is enormous, isn't it? Anyone who damages anything that might be linked to a foreign government where the damage might cause that government to change its behavior for better or worse is now potentially in section 69 territory. Then striking dockers who refuse to load weapons, protesters who block a runway, activists who pour red paint on an embassy wall.

[00:04:16]The mechanism doesn't ask whether the cause was just. It doesn't ask whether the weapons were lawful. It asks whether the action might influence a government and almost every protest worth doing meets that test, doesn't it? We're now in protest equals terror terrorism territory. Are we not?

[00:04:36]Now, here's the part that ought to make every barrister in the country sit up because Johnson did not allow the defense to give evidence of motivation.

[00:04:42]The four defendants were not permitted to tell the jury why they did what they did. They were not allowed to put before the jury what Elbit Systems does, what the defendants believed its drones were used for, what was happening in Gaza in August of 2024, what they believed about Israel's conduct. The jury heard a stripped down account of physical damage to property, weighted against the criminal damage statute, and returned a verdict. They did not hear that the defendants believed they were preventing crimes against humanity. They didn't hear the legal defense of necessity in any meaningful form. They did not hear because they were not allowed to hear.

[00:05:20]And then on top of that, the judge had already ruled before any of this began that if guilty verdicts came on those relevant charges, he had a terrorist connection route waiting in the wings.

[00:05:31]The jury convicted on criminal damage, Johnson is now expected to decide whether to sentence with terrorism attached. So the gap between those two things is the entire story.

[00:05:42]Virginia men on KC who represented one of the defendants tried during the trial to invite the jury to acquit on the grounds of conscience what is known as jury equity or the principle from Bushel's case from back in 1670 that a jury cannot be punished for returning a verdict that the judge dislikes.

[00:06:00]Bushel's case is one of the foundational principles of the English common law.

[00:06:04]It's what stops a judge from directing a jury to a verdict. It's what makes the jury independent. Menon raised it in court and Johnson referred him directly to the high court for contempt of court.

[00:06:16]Menon appealed as you would imagine he would and he won. Of course, the court of appeal ruled that Johnson had no jurisdiction to refer him in the way he did. That the contempt route Johnson tried to use was procedurally wrong. It was unlawful. The judge did something that was unlawful. The matter could still theoretically be referred via the attorney general or another high court judge sitting in the crown court, but the route Johnson chose was outside his powers. And so a senior king's council raised a 355year-old principle of jury independence in defense of his client and a high court judge tried to refer him for contempt over it. The court of appeal had to step in and say, "No, you cannot do this."

[00:06:55]That happened. That's on the record now.

[00:06:58]And it tells you something about how this trial has been run and how aggressively the bench was pushing the defense out of the room. Does this sound like justice to you? The sentencing masks are where the consequence becomes physical though. If Johnson finds the terrorist connection at sentencing and the reporting is that he is expected to.

[00:07:16]And let's face it, given his conduct thus far, it's a brave person to bet against it, isn't it? The four convicted defendants will not end up serving the standard 40% of a determinate sentence that a non-terrorist prisoner would usually serve. They may serve the whole sentence unless the parole board approves release after 2/3. That's not a minor procedural adjustment. That's the difference between, say, four years served on a 10-year sentence and 6 years and 8 months served as a minimum with the back end at the discretion of a board that's got every incentive to air on the side of caution when the file is there with terrorism stamped across it in big red letters. And the post-release conditions can be lifelong. These are things that people don't realize.

[00:07:58]Registration of devices, registration of bank accounts, registration of email addresses, even registration of personal relationships.

[00:08:06]That's the regime applied to people treated through terrorism law in this country. That's what may now come down the line for four people who broke into a weapons factory and damaged some drones.

[00:08:18]The conviction is criminal damage.

[00:08:20]Johnson may now calibrate the sentence through terrorism instead. The two things are being welded together by a single judge's ruling that was hidden from the juries who actually heard the case.

[00:08:31]Cage, the advocacy organization, has set out exactly what the jury was denied.

[00:08:35]They were not told about the defendants's motivations. They were not shown evidence of what was happening in Gaza. They were not shown what the weapons being dismantled were alleged to do. And this is the key one, they were not told that their verdict could expose the defendants to terrorism sentencing.

[00:08:50]The jury, in other words, were asked to perform a routine criminal damage trial without being told they were sitting on something that could be reclassified the moment they delivered their verdict.

[00:09:00]They could not factor it in. They could not weigh it. They were managing one set of stakes while another set was being held back from them. And that's before we get to the people arrested outside the court for holding signs about jury equity. Supporters lifted by police for the act of telling jurors on the public street that they had the historic right to acquit on conscience.

[00:09:21]The criminalization is not just inside the courtroom. It's spilling out onto our pavements, too. This is the structural shape of this thing. A weapons company operates a factory in Bristol, making equipment for a foreign government engaged in a war now under examination in a genocide case at the International Court of Justice.

[00:09:38]Activists break into the factory and damage that equipment. They are charged with criminal damage. Before the trial begins, a high court judge rules without the jury's knowledge and without the public's knowledge that there appears to be a terrorist connection behind the case. The defense is barred from explaining why the action was taken. The jury is barred from hearing the context.

[00:09:58]The barristister who invokes jury independence is referred for contempt and only an appeal knocks out the route used against him. The reporting restrictions hold for over a year and when they finally lift, what is revealed is that the whole architecture of the trial, what the jury heard, what they did not hear, what the defense was allowed to say, what the consequences of conviction could be was all shaped by a ruling that nobody in the courtroom was permitted to discuss. That is the filtering case. And the sentencing on the 12th of June appears set to test whether a section 69 terrorist connection finding can be applied to direct action against a foreign weapons supplier on British soil.

[00:10:37]But the wider point, and this is where it stops being about six defendants in Bristol, is that the legal architecture being tested here applies to every protest movement in Britain that touches a state interest. Now, the 2-year imprisonment threshold for section 69 catches almost every serious public order offense. The influence of government government test catches almost every single politically motivated action. The exclusion of motivation evidence at trial means the jury never hears why. The hidden pre-trial ruling means the sentencing track can be set before the verdict comes in. The contempt threat against defense council sends an unmistakable message to the bar. and the reporting restrictions mean none of it is visible until after the verdict by which point the political moment has passed and the defendants are already on their way to custody. That's not a quirk of one judge or one case. That's a working system and it was built in part by the 2021 counterterrorism and sentencing act warned about in the lords of the time and is now operational.

[00:11:40]Filton now looks like proof of the concept.

[00:11:44]Free the Filton 24 the support campaign for all 24 defendants connected to the Elbert factory actions is calling supporters to Woodish Crown Court on the 12th of June. That's where Johnson is expected to make the terrorist connection determination formal if he finds it proved with the defendants present and the sentencing handed down.

[00:12:02]The four convicted on criminal damage may become the test subjects for the first major application of this provision to direct action against a foreign arms supplier. Whatever Johnson rules on the 12th of June is going to set a template for every comparable case that follows. If the terrorist connection holds, the state will have a tested route for converting protest convictions into terrorism linked sentences without the jury ever being told. If it falls on appeal or on review, then it will need a viscerating.

[00:12:32]Either way, the sentencing decision on the 12th of June will show whether section 69 can be deployed against political action that damages property linked to a foreign government's weapon supply. And that question is going to be answered with four people in the dock who broke into a factory because it's owned by a nation committing genocide and they believe the drones being built there were killing children in Gaza.

[00:12:52]That is the case. That's the architecture. That is what the lifted gag order has finally allowed us to see and talk about and to inform you about.

[00:13:00]And I hope it scares the out of you because this is what this country is now becoming. Four people convicted of criminal damage may now be sentenced through terrorism law for damaging weapons equipment bound for a state under investigation for genocide. And the judge who ruled that a terrorist connection appeared to sit behind the case before the trial even began was the same judge who tried to refer their barristister for contempt for invoking the principle that has protected English juries since 16 bloody 70. Now, are you going to kick up a stink about this like me or are you just going to accept it?

[00:13:33]For more on the legal attack launched on defense barristister Rajiv Menon, as well as further details on this case, do check out more of the story in this recommendation right here. Please do also hit like, share, and subscribe if you haven't done so already, so as to ensure you don't miss out on all new daily content, sort of spreading the word and helping support the channel at the same time, which is very much appreciated, holding power to account for ordinary working-class people. And I'll hopefully catch you on the next one. Cheers.