Press Releases & Updates 2010
6th February 2010
Aldermaston peace prisoner released
Trident Ploughshares activist spent four days in HMP Pentonville
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Trident Ploughshares activist Dan Viesnik was released on Friday, 5 February, after spending four days in custody in HMP Pentonville in north London.
Last Monday, 1 February 2010, Dan was sentenced by Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court to fourteen days imprisonment with immediate effect for refusing to pay a fine (£50) and court costs (£465) for a peaceful symbolic sit-down blockade outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston in July 2007 during a 12-week peace walk from Dublin to London (via Belfast and Glasgow). He was released early for good behaviour.
Over twenty people came to support Dan at court, including members of Trident Ploughshares, CND, Campaign Against Arms Trade, Kingston Peace Council, London Catholic Worker, the London Peace Pagoda, Brent Green Party and Brent Friends of the Earth.
Before sentencing, Dan read out the following speech to the court:
"I stand here in court today because I was prosecuted and convicted of the crime of peacefully trying to prevent another Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
"While billions of people around the world languish in poverty, the Government continues to spend billions of pounds on new weapons of mass murder and destruction.
"Tony Blair, who went to war with Iraq with Bush over weapons of mass destruction that never existed, enjoyed the protection of hundreds of police officers when he appeared before the Iraq Inquiry last Friday. I know because I was there. Yet when people like me try to uphold international law when the Government fails in its duty to do so, it is us who get prosecuted and convicted.
"I will finish if I may by quoting Henry David Thoreau: ’Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.’ "
For more details, see: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/01/445488.html
You can view a short video of Dan speaking outside court, interspersed with footage from CND’s 50th anniversary demo at Aldermaston in 2008, here:
http://current.com/items/92131286_taking-a-stand-dan-viesnik-wmd-aldermaston.htm
For press interviews, call: 07506 234 091
Last updated: 23rd February 2010
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