1.Six appeal - John Vidal
2.Protest is criminalised - George Monbiot
3."We have been lied to... I dared to speak the truth" - Walter Wolfgang

Here are two pieces from The Guardian (items 1 & 2) that deal with the recent court case involving the George Fox 6 protesters.

Item 3's a piece by Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old survivor of the Nazis who got dragged out of Blair's Labour party conference last week for shouting the word "nonsense" during a speech on Iraq.

Please aso note that the claim by Lancaster University's Vice Chancellor (item 1) - "The Crown Prosecution Service decided there was a case to answer, and from then on it was out of the university's hands" - is totally false.

A criminal trespass case can only be brought with the agreement of the landowner, ie the university had to want its students dragged into court. Indeed, we know from what actually happened in court last Friday that the Univesity Secretary was present throughout *advising the prosecution*!
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5791

"As the parliamentary opposition falls apart, the extra-parliamentary one is being closed down with hardly a rumble of protest from the huffers and puffers who insist that civil liberties are Britain's gift to the world." - George Monbiot

More background on GF6: http://www.free-webspace.biz/GeorgeFox/
Sign the Petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/gfox6/
---

1.Six appeal
Eco Soundings
John Vidal
The Guardian, October 5, 2005
http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,7843,1584571,00.html

Outrage is growing at the criminal sentences that have just been passed on six Lancaster University students who for three minutes last year talked politely to representatives of arms manufacturers, GM, oil and other companies who met on their campus to discuss corporate links with academe.

The George Fox 6, as they are now known, will appeal against the two-year suspended sentences, but academics, students, environmentalists and human rights groups are all weighing in with choice expletives.

"Out-bloody-rageous", "Police state . . . closer", "Fascism . . . alive and well are just three posted this week on the Six's website.
http://www.petitiononline.com/gfox6/

Meanwhile, Paul Wellings, Lancaster's vice-chancellor, is desperately trying to shore up the university's crumbling reputation as a centre for independent thought and debate. He says: "Historically, we have a strong commitment to peaceful protest . . . The Crown Prosecution Service decided there was a case to answer, and from then on it was out of the university's hands."
---

2.Protest is criminalised
The police abuse terror and harassment laws to penalise dissent while we insist civil liberties are our gift to the world
George Monbiot
The Guardian, October 4, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1584114,00.html

"We are trying to fight 21st-century crime - antisocial behaviour, drug dealing, binge drinking, organised crime - with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens." Tony Blair, September 27 2005.

"Down poured the wine like oil on blazing fire. And still the riot went on - the debauchery gained its height - glasses were dashed upon the floor by hands that could not carry them to lips, oaths were shouted out by lips which could scarcely form the words to vent them in; drunken losers cursed and roared; some mounted on the tables, waving bottles above their heads and bidding defiance to the rest; some danced, some sang, some tore the cards and raved. Tumult and frenzy reigned supreme ..." Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens, 1839.

All politicians who seek to justify repressive legislation claim that they are responding to an unprecedented threat to public order. And all politicians who cite such a threat draft measures in response which can just as easily be used against democratic protest. No act has been passed over the past 20 years with the aim of preventing antisocial behaviour, disorderly conduct, trespass, harassment and terrorism that has not also been deployed to criminalise a peaceful public engagement in politics. When Walter Wolfgang was briefly detained by the police after heckling the foreign secretary last week, the public caught a glimpse of something that a few of us have been vainly banging on about for years.

On Friday, six students and graduates of Lancaster University were convicted of aggravated trespass. Their crime was to have entered a lecture theatre and handed out leaflets to the audience. Staff at the university were meeting people from BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Shell, the Carlyle Group, GlaxoSmithKline, DuPont, Unilever and Diageo, to learn how to "commercialise university research". The students were hoping to persuade the researchers not to sell their work. They were in the theatre for three minutes. As the judge conceded, they tried neither to intimidate anyone nor to stop the conference from proceeding.

They were prosecuted under the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, passed when Michael Howard was the Conservative home secretary. But the university was able to use it only because Labour amended the act in 2003 to ensure that it could be applied anywhere, rather than just "in the open air".

Had Mr Wolfgang said "nonsense" twice during the foreign secretary's speech, the police could have charged him under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Harassment, the act says, "must involve conduct on at least two occasions ... conduct includes speech". Parliament was told that its purpose was to protect women from stalkers, but the first people to be arrested were three peaceful protesters. Since then it has been used by the arms manufacturer EDO to keep demonstrators away from its factory gates, and by Kent police to arrest a woman who sent an executive at a drugs company two polite emails, begging him not to test his products on animals. In 2001 the peace campaigners Lindis Percy and Anni Rainbow were prosecuted for causing "harassment, alarm or distress" to American servicemen at the Menwith Hill military intelligence base in Yorkshire, by standing at the gate h