Right, so on the 12th of May, the reporting restrictions came off the Filton case, and 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 2025, 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 Elbit Systems factory in Filton, near Bristol, in August 2024. That ruling was kept from the jury in the first trial. It was kept from the jury in the second trial. And it has been kept from the public until now. Two juries sat through the case. The first cleared the defendants of aggravated burglary and failed to reach verdicts on criminal damage; the second convicted four of criminal damage, while still being kept away from the terrorism consequence Johnson had already ruled appeared to sit behind the case. Four of them - Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Rajwani - 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. Two others - Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin - were acquitted of criminal damage, despite having admitted it, so fathom that one out. 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 Woolwich 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 2020. Now, section 69 is not a terrorism charge. It is not anything the jury sees. It is an aggravating factor applied at sentencing by the judge alone, after conviction, on an offence that has nothing to do with terrorism on its face. The Sentencing Council guidance is explicit about how this works - any offence punishable on indictment by more than two years’ imprisonment can be deemed to have a terrorist connection, unless it is specifically excluded. Criminal damage at scale clears that threshold without breaking a sweat. The parliamentary explanatory notes from the 2021 Bill that widened this provision make it equally explicit - any non-terrorism offence over the two-year ceiling can now carry a terrorist-connection finding. And during the Lords debate in March 2021, peers warned in plain language that this would allow a jury to convict somebody of a basic offence while a judge later added a terrorist connection at sentencing without the jury ever knowing it was on the table. That warning was made on the record, five years ago, by parliamentarians who saw exactly where this was going. They were told it would be used sparingly. They were told it would be used in extremis. 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 is the test he applied. That is 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. I’ll put it another way. The argument is that damaging weapons equipment linked to a foreign state - equipment the defence 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! The logical reach of that is enormous. Anyone who damages anything linked to a foreign government, where the damage might cause that government to change its behaviour, is now potentially in section 69 territory. Striking dockers who refuse to load weapons. Protestors who block a runway. Activists who pour red paint on an embassy wall. The mechanism does not ask whether the cause was just. It does not 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 are now in protest equals terrorism territory.
Now here is the part that ought to make every barrister in the country sit up. Johnson did not allow the defence to give evidence of motivation. 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 2024, or what they believed about Israel’s conduct. The jury heard a stripped-down account of physical damage to property, weighed it against the criminal damage statute, and returned a verdict. They did not hear that the defendants believed they were preventing crimes against humanity. They did not hear the legal defence of necessity in any meaningful form. They did not hear, because they were not allowed to hear. And then on top of that, the judge had already ruled - before any of this began - that if guilty verdicts came back on the relevant charges, he had a terrorist-connection route waiting in the wings. The jury convicted on criminal damage. Johnson is now expected to decide whether to sentence with terrorism attached. The gap between those two things is the entire story.
Rajiv Menon 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 in 1670 that a jury cannot be punished for returning a verdict the judge dislikes. Bushel’s Case is one of the foundational principles of the English common law. It is what stops a judge from directing a jury to a verdict. It is what makes the jury independent. Menon raised it, in court, and Johnson referred him directly to the High Court for contempt. Menon appealed. And he won. 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 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. So a senior King’s Counsel raised a 355-year-old principle of jury independence in defence of his client, and a High Court judge tried to refer him for contempt over it, and the Court of Appeal had to step in and say no, you cannot do this. That happened. That is on the record. And it tells you something about how this trial has been run, and how aggressively the bench was pushing the defence out of the room. Does this sound like justice to you?
The sentencing maths are where the consequence becomes physical though. If Johnson finds the terrorist connection at sentencing - and the reporting is that he is expected to and let’s face it, given his conduct thusfar it’s a brave person to bet against it - the four convicted defendants do not serve 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 two-thirds. That is not a minor procedural adjustment. That is the difference between, say, four years served on a ten-year sentence and six years and eight months served as a minimum, with the back end at the discretion of a board that has every incentive to err on the side of caution when the file is marked terrorism. And the post-release conditions can be lifelong - registration of devices, registration of bank accounts, registration of email addresses, even registration of personal relationships. That is the regime applied to people treated through terrorism law in this country. That is what may now come down the line for four people who broke into a weapons factory and damaged some drones. The conviction is criminal damage. 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 heard the case.
CAGE, the advocacy organisation, has set out what the jury was denied. They were not told about the defendants’ 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. 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. 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 is before we get to the people arrested outside 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. The criminalisation is not just inside the courtroom. It is spilling out onto our pavements too.
This is the structural shape of the 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. 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, without the public’s knowledge - that there appears to be a terrorist connection behind the case. The defence is barred from explaining why the action was taken. The jury is barred from hearing the context. The barrister 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 defence was allowed to say, what the consequences of conviction could be - was shaped by a ruling that nobody in the courtroom was permitted to discuss. That is the Filton 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.
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 two-year imprisonment threshold for section 69 catches almost every serious public order offence. The “influence a government” test catches almost every 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 defence counsel 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 is not a quirk of one judge or one case. That is a working system. It was built, in part, by the 2021 Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act, warned about in the Lords at the time, and is now operational. Filton now looks like the proof of concept.
Free the Filton 24 - the support campaign for all twenty-four defendants connected to the Elbit factory actions - is calling supporters to Woolwich Crown Court on the 12th of June. That is 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. 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 will 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 – it needs eviscerating. 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 weapons supply. And that question is going to be answered with four people in the dock who broke into a factory because it is owned by a nation committing genocide and they believed the drones being built there were killing children in Gaza. That is the case. That is the architecture. That is what the lifted gag order has finally allowed us to see and to talk about and to inform you about and hopefully scare the s**t out of you as to what this country is 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 began was the same judge who tried to refer their barrister for contempt for invoking the principle that has protected English juries since 1670. Now are you going to kick up a stink about this like me, or just accept it?
For more on the legal attack launched on Defence Barrister Rajiv Menon as well as further details on this case, do check out more of the story in this recommendation here.
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