Gaie Delap recalled to prison
A Bristol Quaker has been recalled to prison
A Bristol Quaker who was recalled to prison after a surveillance tag could not be fitted will likely spend her seventy-eighth birthday in prison.
Gaie Delap’s brother, Mick Delap, told the Friend that the Redland Meeting Friend was taken into HMP Eastwood Park, in South Gloucestershire, just before Christmas. ‘As Gaie has only just been able to establish phone and email links out, she’s been basically cut off for nearly two weeks,’ he said. ‘There is no movement [in terms of releasing her from prison], and she has now seen the official account of her recall, which seems to be extremely inaccurate… claiming that she refused tags, and so on, all of which she didn’t. We are pressing for the Electronic Monitoring Service, and the minister of justice, Shabana Mahmood, to investigate, and also to find her a tag. We know that there are tags that fit her, but they seem unable, or unprepared, to find her one. She will be seventy-eight on 10 January, and it is looking likely she will still be there in prison.’
According to Mick Delap, who spoke to Gaie early last week, ‘she is making the most of it; very observant about what’s going on; funny, and very angry; but she knows she shouldn’t be in jail, and we are pushing on’.
The Redland Friend was sent to prison in August along with four co-defendants, who climbed gantries over the M25 in November 2022. The Just Stop Oil action forced police to stop traffic and left an estimated 709,000 drivers stuck in gridlock.
Released from prison several months later, Gaie Delap was to serve the rest of her sentence under a Home Detention Curfew (HDC). But the tag could not be attached to her ankle due to a health condition, and no devices were small enough to fit her wrists.
Last month Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) called on James Timpson, the prisons minister, to ‘find a commonsense solution that keeps this nonviolent citizen out of our overcrowded prisons’.
The case ‘underscores fears about the impact of increasingly strict protest laws on human rights’, added BYM.
A Ministry of Justice statement said: ‘Neither Ministers nor officials can intervene in sentences passed down by the independent Courts.’
