The most important anti-war Case since Nuremberg ?

This month (commencing 20th February) the Law Lords will hear the combined appeals in the cases of the Fairford five and the Marchwood 14. The legal implications of the ruling are momentous, involving the power of the courts to examine the legality of the Governments’ war waging actions, the right of campaigners to claim “crime prevention” as a defence to direct action against state power, and the national application to our own Government’s international behaviour, of what the Nuremberg judgement described as the “ultimate war crime”. But as important as these legal implications are, they are as nothing to political consequences were the Law Lords to rule that, at their forthcoming trial in the Crown Court in Bristol, the judge must reaching a finding on the question of the day - “was the war legal ?”

Regina v Jones, Milling, Olditch, Pritchard & Richards
Five peace enforcers who at various times in the week before the war started on 20 Mar 2003, and acting as three quite separate groups of individuals, broke through the perimeter fence at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. Some managed to disabled equipment but others were arrested before they could reach the bombers. Their stated aim was to cause damage to property, with the intention of actually stopping or at east delaying the war waging preparations taking place. Fourteen USAF B-52H bombers had been deployed from the 23rd “Bomber Barons” Squadron based in North Dakota, and were then preparing for their ugly part in the "shock and awe" assault on downtown Baghdad, in the first week of the war.

Regina v Ayliffe & others, R v Swain
Feb 3 2003, six wks before the start of the war, 14 members of the crew of the Greenpeace International ship "Rainbow Warrior" went ashore at the MoD Sea Mounting Base at Marchword on Southampton Water. Having occupied part of the site they chained themselves to Scimitar armoured fighting vehicles awaiting loading onto ships for transport to Kuwait. Val Swain, also at RAF Fairford, but acting in the week before those in Jones et al, was arrested inside the base, having cut her way through the fence, before she could begin her peace enforcement action.

Both sets of Appellants have argued in their defence that, under s.3 of the Criminal Law Act 1967, they were entitled to act reasonably as they did in order to prevent a much greater crime being committed by the Crown, namely the preparations then on going for the unlawful attack upon and subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq. Further that they should (or should have been) permitted to present evidence at trial to justify their beliefs that the war, the preparations for which they sought to disrupt/prevent, was itself an illegal act of naked international aggression, comprising in an Crime Against Peace / Crime of Aggression as defined at the Nuremberg tribunal. In addition the Greenpeace appellants have deployed a similar argument in relation to their conviction under s.68 of the Criminal Justice & Public Order Act 1994 (Aggravated trespass), namely that the activity they sought to disrupt was unlawful.

The Fairford five are yet to be tried by Grigson J sitting in the Crown Court at Bristol, but lost their appeal against his ruling in a preparatory hearing in April 2004, when that was heard by the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) in July 2004. The Greenpeace appellants were convicted by the District Judge sitting at Southampton magistrates' court in 2003 and subsequently lost their appeal case stated to the Divisional Court in April 2005.

Robbie Manson
Jan 20, 2006.