Press Releases & Updates 2004

On 26th January, in the same court, Justice of the Peace Bert Alexander acquitted Tor Justad and Jan Sutch Pickard on a charge of breach of the peace. He said there was a lack of evidence that any one was alarmed or that any reasonable person would have been alarmed by their actions of in sitting down in the gateway during the Really Big Blockade of the base on 22nd April last year.

Today Morag Balfour from Glenrothes was found guilty of the offence, in circumstances that are indistinguishable. She had taken part in a “die-in” at Faslane on Hiroshima Day (6th August) last year and had lain in the gateway. As with Tor and Jan, there was no evidence of any traffic being held up, no evidence of alarm or its likelihood, or of anything other than an entirely peaceful and nonviolent event. Morag was fined £100.

The cases of Mark Leech and Roz Bullen, both from Edinburgh, were marginally different in that they had been part of a group locked together at the mass blockade of Faslane last April, though again there was no evidence of alarm. They were fined only £50 each, due to the fact that the procurator fiscal had no record of previous convictions. This caused a smile in the public seats, given the honourable record of both in civil resistance to Trident and the arms trade.

A Trident Ploughshares spokesperson said: “ We are disappointed that a magistrate who seemed to be willing on 26th January to apply the law has within the space of a few weeks entirely lost the plot, and we do wonder what pressure he has come under following his acquittal of Tor and Jan. We can only hope that when the Scottish High Court hears a cluster of breach of the peace appeals next week it will come out with a judgment in plain English which will clarify the offence in such terms as will remove the possibility of misinterpretation due to ignorance or political bias.”

Note: On 2nd and 3rd March the Scottish High Court is due to hear five appeals against convictions for breach of the peace, three of them relating to civil resistance to Trident, leading to what is likely to be a landmark ruling. A panel of five judges, rather than the usual three, will hear the appeals, giving additional authority to their judgment. The aim is to clarify what actually constitutes a breach of the peace, which has been a controversial and problematic part of the criminal law. The issue is especially relevant to the future of peaceful protest in Scotland, not only to the struggle against Trident but to other campaigns for justice, peace and the environment.

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