Press Releases & Updates 2001
10th December 2001
Hefty Compensation Order for Remembrance Day Action
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Today a Scottish magistrate ordered two Trident Ploughshares activists to
pay substantial compensation to the Ministry of Defence after finding them
guilty of cutting a fence at Faslane naval base on Remembrance Day last year.
Jean Oliver (41), a youth worker with the YMCA from Biggar in Lanarkshire,
and Douglas Shaw (51), a librarian, also from Biggar, were jointly charged
with breaching the bye-laws which apply to the base and with causing
malicious damage. In November 2000 they cut their way into the oil-depot to
the north of Faslane.
Jean told Justice of the Peace Viv Dance that she had a simple defence to
the charges, based on morality: Trident was designed to murder innocent
people and that was wrong. Testing nuclear weapons and mining uranium for
them had already caused many deaths and great suffering.
She said: "It is
incredible that we have got to through all this to warn people about this
mass murder and mass suicide by the destruction of the environment that
supports all our lives."
JP Dance found Jean and Douglas guilty on both
charges, fining them £50 for the alleged breach of the bye-laws. Although
she admonished them on the malicious damage charge this was to take account
of the amount of compensation involved. Procurator Fiscal Jonathan Kemp
said that the estimated cost of repairing the section of chain-link fence
they had cut was £1495.13. When Jean challenged this the PF said that the
estimate had come from the MOD’s Facilities Manager - an explanation which
somehow satisfied the JP. They were each ordered to pay a half of this sum.
Jean and Douglas are likely to appeal the compensation order as based on a
highly dubious estimate of which they had been given no prior notification.
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Trident Ploughshares,
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