UK: Green Anarchist journalists jailed
01 November 1997
Three editors of the Green Anarchist (GA) magazine, Steve Booth, Sax Wood and Noel Molland, were jailed for 3 years each at Portsmouth crown court, Hampshire, in November. The men received the lengthy prison sentences after a controversial twelve-week trial at which they were found guilty of publishing information liable to "incite persons unknown" to commit criminal damage.
All three men have lodged an appeal. A fourth GA defendant, Paul Rogers, will have his case heard in the new year while Simon Russell, a former editor of the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Newsletter was acquitted.
The Gandalf (an acronym of Green Anarchist and Animal Liberation Front) trial centred around the Green Anarchist magazine which regularly reports environmental and animal rights actions by groups such as ALF and the Earth Liberation Front. The charges, laid by Hampshire police, resulted from an extensive police investigation - Operation Washington - into animal rights groups that targeted the ALF.
However, following the acquittal of ALF spokesperson Robin Webb last December, the case proceeded with conspiracy to incite charges against the GA editors, which presume that merely listing offences committed by animal rights activists is illegal and will incite people to commit criminal damage.
The prosecution and jailing of the three men has been described as "an outrageous intrusion on press freedom" by the magazine Index on Censorship and condemned by John Wadham, director of Liberty, who commented that "People should be convicted on the basis of what they have done, not what they have agreed to do." Critics have also noted that members of far-right organisations have never been charged with this offence, despite publishing explicit calls to attack or kill named Jewish, Black and Asian people and anti-fascist activists, complete with photographs and personal details. The jailing of the journalists has serious freedom of speech implications and is widely perceived as an attempt to gag sympathetic reporting of direct action protests.
The Gandalf Defendants Campaign can be contacted at PO Box 66, Stevenage SG1 2TR; Tel. 0956 694922.
Green Anarchist No. 49/50 (Autumn) 1997; Gandalf Defendants Campaign press release 13.11.97; SchNEWS 143 14.11.97; Big Issue 24.11.97; M. Lynas "Publish and be jailed..." 18.11.97.
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