How Palestine Action put the justice system on trial
The article is an account of the trial of six Palestine Action activists who broke into Elbit Systems factory in Filton, Bristol in August 2024. Since I am only able to quote a small section I suggest reading the original article. It has very recently been announced that the six will face a retrial on the charges that the jury was unable to reach a verdict on.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-palestine-action-put-the-justice-system-on-trial/
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The missing footage
Elbit was not even called to give evidence about their apparently unfit-for-purpose security surveillance system. Remember this is a high-tech company that provides sophisticated surveillance systems for border walls, but more than a year after the incident, it came to light during the trial that the map of CCTV cameras given to the defence team had several missing including those in areas of the factory where disputed incidents had taken place.
Testimony from police witnesses, and in particular the CCTV recovery officer working for the police’s National Digital Exploitation Service, revealed for the first time various issues with camera footage, none of which had been in her original written statement. In the afternoon at the start of the trial’s third week when the jury was not in the court, Menon said that the defence had been kept in the dark about these issues, and only by pressing harder during the trial had they finally been given unredacted body-worn footage including the moment security guard Angelo Volante entered the factory wielding a whip.
Another clip showing Volante moving towards someone while holding a sledgehammer triggered a wider request on 18 November, and the defence team were then drip fed around 300 pages of further evidence including email traffic between the police and an anonymised senior Elbit employee known as “Witness Alpha”.
On 2 December, defence barristers were cross-examining a police officer, PC Sarah Grant. Menon asked Grant if Elbit had sole control and access to the CCTV system for two days. She replied yes. He then quoted an email she had sent to “Witness Alpha” in which she wrote: “There’s a huge opportunity for the defence counsel to use the gaps and jumps to their advantage”. Menon then questioned why among the correspondence revealed in the hundreds of pages of new evidence, police appeared to be “chatting with Israel’s largest arms manufacturer about what the defence counsel might do”.
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