Press Releases & Updates 2004

The Magistrate’s sympathy with the sincerity, seriousness and “high moral fibre” of the six, who he understood clearly to be “uncommonly conscientious people”, was shown by the fact that the total of the fines and costs they have been ordered to pay is just £380, which is less even than the MoD’s estimate for the cost of the repairs to the fence which the six cut.

In their summing up, the defendants argued that the very ownership of assembled and ready-to-use nuclear weapons is not only immoral but criminal under international law. The presiding Magistrate agreed that Britain’s having joined the ICC was a new factor, which opened up the possibility of activities that aided and abetted internationally illegal activities, such as Geoff Hoon’s threats last year to use of nuclear weapons against Iraq, being adjudged criminal. If so, then acting to prevent that crime - the crime of maintaining our nuclear threat, as Burghfield/Aldermaston does - might not after all constitute criminal da mage.

The Magistrate also made very clear that, under the Nuremberg principles, simply obeying orders is no defence in law. This was especially striking after one of the defendants, Kathryn Amos (a Ph.D in Environmental Science from UEA Norwich, now doing post-doctoral studies in Leeds), cited in her defence a discussion with her interviewing police officer in which the officer declared that he was happy simply to obey orders, in manning Burghfield base. (The ‘Burghfield six’ undertook their action partly so as directly to inform all Burghfield personnel of their rights and responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Laws.)

Very disappointingly, however, the Magistrate found the activists guilty anyway, concluding that the case of the six was still not sufficiently dissimilar to a previous case decided against a Trident Ploughshares activist (‘Hutchinson’) in a higher Court on a previous occasion, a decision which (at least in relevantly similar cases) is binding on magistrates.

Rupert Read, press contact for the defendants, said after the verdict, “American Supreme Court Justice John P. Stevens recently declared, in relation to the detention and torture at Guantanamo Bay, that “We must not wield the tools of tyranny even to resist the forces of tyranny.” Nuclear blackmail, which Geoff Hoon recently employed against Iraq, is an obscene tool of tyranny. It must be stopped. ‘The Bughfield six’ have played a real part in the gradual process of stopping it.”

Kathryn Amos added, “It is crucial that our message is understood by those working on nuclear bases: We have no personal enmity against you. We believe that you need to be told the truth about your responsibilities under international law as well as British law. If you were told the truth, we think you would see that what you are engaged in is criminal activity that must end. We hope that you will draw this conclusion, before, one day, it may be too late. We encourage all citizens to do similar actions to that that we took in Burghfield this June, until Britain’s WMDs are disarmed.”

The activists who cut into Burghfield comprise a 47 year-old History teacher, a 19 year-old bar-worker, a 43 year-old self-educated single parent, a 30 year-old violin teacher, a 27 year-old sustainable policy adviser, and a 25 year-old university researcher.

Notes

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