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INJUSTICE Issue: 24
March 2010
Several more demonstrators who took part in last year’s anti-Israel rallies at the height of atrocities in Gaza have been jailed in the UK, raising concern that the prosecutions are politically motivated. The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) criticised the sentencing, saying it “fails to take into account that grave police mismanagement and abuse of police powers contributed to the tense situation at the demonstrations.” “We are concerned that such heavy sentencing, the subsequent confiscation of passports and other intimidatory measures are an attempt to deter protesting, in particular in support of Palestine, and by Muslims,” said IHRC chair Massoud Shadjareh.
At Isleworth Crown Court in London, one more protester was sentenced to 12 months in prison, while another will serve ten months in a Young Offenders Institute. A total of seventeen have so far been jailed in connections to the protests at the Israeli Embassy, receiving sentences between eight months and two and a half years. Another 45 people who have pleaded guilty are yet to be sentenced, while trials are still awaited for another 17, who unlike the majority have refused to change their not guilty pleas. The IHRC said that two of those already sentenced were only 16 at the time of the demonstrations, while another was a Palestinian who
lost two cousins murdered by Israeli security forces days before the rally. The severity of the sentencing has also provoked strong reaction from supporters of the Britain’s largest peace group network, Stop The War Coalition (STWC). STWC, which described the jail terms as “draconian” particularly because the majority have no prior convictions, have been holding protests outside the court and held a meeting in the British parliament. An IHCR report into the protests, published last month, found some very disturbing eyewitness accounts of allegedly unprofessional police conduct, in some cases amounting to police brutality, during the demonstrations. Claims were that “law enforcement officials used tactics of intimidation and indiscriminate, disproportionate force”; they “failed to communicate effectively with demonstrators” and employed “heavy handedness” and “abusive language”. The report makes a particular point of criticising the tactic of “corralling or ‘kettling’ demonstrators”. It claims that riot police “charged into the crowd” on more than one occasion and that there were also reports at one point that gas was used against the crowds. Over 30 officially recorded complaints have been filed about the way that the police treated the protests, but it is thought that all have been dismissed by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.