Four Palestine Action activists have been convicted after a retrial over a violent protest at an Elbit Systems UK site near Bristol, where drones and other equipment were smashed up in 2024. Jurors last week found Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Rajwani guilty of criminal damage, but they were not told that a judge had already ruled the case appeared to involve a terrorist connection.
The ruling, made by Mr Justice Johnson in March 2025, stayed in place for the retrial and remained hidden from the jury in both trials. On Tuesday, reporting restrictions were lifted, revealing that Johnson had found there appeared to be a terrorist connection to the offences before the first trial began. That finding does not mean the four were convicted of terror charges. It does mean the issue may shape how long they spend in prison and how they are classified after release.
The protest took place at the Elbit Systems UK site in 2024 and involved a break-in and damage to drones and other equipment. Palestine Action had not yet been proscribed at the time. Criminal damage is not ordinarily treated as a terrorist offence, but a separate determination will now be made at sentencing on whether the offences carried a terrorism connection under the Terrorism Act 2000.
If the court decides that there was such a connection, the four would have to serve their whole sentence in prison unless a parole board approved release after two-thirds of their sentence. By contrast, non-terrorist prisoners usually serve 40% of their sentence. They could also be recorded as terrorists for life after release. That prospect gives the case a significance far beyond the criminal damage verdict itself, because it turns a protest trial into a sentencing fight over whether the law should treat the defendants as terrorists at all.
Johnson’s April 21 ruling also cut off a broad line of defence evidence. He said the defendants could not give evidence about their motivation, including their reasons for joining Palestine Action, their beliefs about Elbit’s supply of weapons to Israel for use in the war in Gaza, or their views on Israel’s actions in Gaza or their legality. He also barred evidence about their purpose in causing damage to property at the factory beyond an intention to destroy it. In his ruling, Johnson accepted that one purpose of the action was to damage weapons and save lives, but said that did not rule out another purpose of damaging property to be made available to the Israeli government and thereby influence it.
The decision leaves the court with a narrow but powerful question at sentencing: whether a protest carried out at an arms factory, before Palestine Action was banned, should now trigger the legal consequences attached to terrorism. A Defend Our Juries spokesperson said the public would be astonished to learn that a protester can be convicted of criminal damage for disrupting an arms factory and then be sentenced as a terrorist without having been convicted of terror charges and with that kept from the jury.
