https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/09/19/zaaa-s19.html
A jury at the Old Bailey on September 18 unanimously acquitted Sarah Cotte, the 22-year-old SOAS graduate prosecuted under Section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 for allegedly supporting the proscribed organisation Hamas. Her “crime” was a speech defending the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation and genocide.
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The absurdity at the heart of the prosecution’s case was that Cotte never mentioned Hamas at all. The organisation is proscribed in Britain, yet the speech used to justify the charge—delivered at a rally at SOAS on October 9, 2023—contained no reference to Hamas whatsoever. The prosecution’s response was to insist that she should have begun her remarks by declaring, unprompted, that she did not support a proscribed organisation. This would require any ordinary person speaking in public to pre‑emptively denounce whoever the state objects to.
At every turn, the prosecution sought to erase the distinction between support for the Palestinian people’s right to armed resistance—recognised under international law and reaffirmed by the UN General Assembly in affirming the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples under colonial and foreign occupation—and support for a specific proscribed organisation.
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The prosecution’s entire case rested on an extraordinary supposition: that a young woman supposedly supporting Hamas had left no trace of that support. No documents, messages, transactions, associations—not even the words of the speech itself—established the allegation.
Prosecutor Rupert Kent asked the jury to believe Cotte was a secret sympathiser who concealed her politics so completely that she never once expressed them, even in the speech for which she was prosecuted.
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See the original article at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/09/19/zaaa-s19.html
