Gaie Delap released to home detention
Gaie is ‘delighted’ to be home and ‘enormously grateful’
The Quaker climate protester Gaie Delap was released from prison on home detention curfew last week. It is understood that the Just Stop Oil (JSO) activist has been fitted with a 15cm wrist strap that, according to The Guardian, was ‘previously deemed unsuitable’.
The decision last Friday came a week after Gaie Delap had been told that she must serve a further twenty days in prison for being ‘unlawfully at large’. According to friends and family at the time, this was accounted for ‘by the days that followed Serco/EMS’s report of 28th November on their failure to fit an appropriate tag on her wrist, and her eventual return to prison just before Christmas’. During that time, Gaie Delap had been ‘fully compliant with her curfew’, they said.
Family and friends had appealed to Shabana Mahmood, the secretary of state for Justice, in a statement after her release date had been changed from 17 March to 7 April.
Calling for an inquiry, an open letter signed by twenty-five charities also called on Shabana Mahmood to revoke Gaie Delap’s recall to prison. The decision to recall the seventy-eight-year-old appeared ‘disproportionate and indicative of systemic failures within the electronic tagging system’, it said.
Mick Delap, Gaie’s brother, said Gaie was ‘delighted’ to be home and ‘enormously grateful’ for the support she received from family and friends, as well as individuals and organisations.
Her release showed ‘that if challenged peacefully by enough people, and if backed by proper reporting, those tasked with applying the law can be persuaded to do their job’, he added.
‘Gaie is keen that we shouldn’t forget the large numbers of prisoners, especially women, serving equally unjust terms of recall whose suffering Gaie’s case has highlighted.’
Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project – which supported the case – welcomed Delap’s release but said it wasn’t ‘the end of the story’. ‘We are now considering what action may be taken against the Ministry of Justice and Serco, who provide tags on behalf of the government, for a breach of equality law,’ he said.
‘The Good Law Project’s position is that climate protesters are being disproportionately policed. The public interest would be much better served if the police went after real criminals.’
Last week the Bristol Quaker was one of sixteen climate activists who appealed against ‘unduly harsh’ sentences in an unusual mass appeal. Another appellant was Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, sentenced to five years for taking part in a Zoom call planning roadblocks on the M25.
Oliver Robertson, head of witness and worship for Britain Yearly Meeting, was one of many speakers at a gathering, including celebrities, outside the Court of Appeal.
