Quakers celebrate Stansted Fifteen news
Friends welcome the news that the Stansted Fifteen protestors have been spared custodial sentences
Quakers flocked to Chelmsford Crown Court last week to hear news that the Stansted Fifteen group of protestors, including one Quaker, had received suspended sentences or community orders and not prison sentences.
In a crowd of several hundred, Friends from Chelmsford, Oxford, Hastings, Cambridge and London came to show solidarity at the sentencing hearing on 6 February for the activists from the End Deportations group. A large cheer went up when they heard that the judge, Christopher Morgan, had accepted that the group were motivated by ‘genuine reasons’. He reached the decision despite instructing the jury not to take the defendants’ humanitarian motivations into account when they were convicted of a terror-related offence last December for blocking the take off of a deportation flight from Stansted Airport in March 2017.
Lyndsay Burtonshaw, attender at Brighton Meeting, told the Friend that she was ‘feeling good’: ‘I’m feeling really bolstered and proud of the Quaker community for being so much behind us. It’s got me thinking about what we, as a wider community can do, to support those facing deportation. We’ve had this threat of prison hanging over us for one and a half years, and I never thought I would die in prison. I can’t imagine how some of the people who have lived with deportation hanging over them for thirteen years and who potentially face death feel.’
She said she was ‘relieved not to go to prison, but I’ve been reading about the deportation flight to Jamaica… It makes me so sad that people’s lives are being destroyed because of this brutal system’.
Brian Wardrop, from Chelmsford Meeting, which acted as a base for the protestors during the ten-week trial, also paid tribute to the support of Friends.
He said: ‘The important point is that this is just the start. We still have a government pursuing…forced deportations and not all of those being deported have gone through due process.’
In a move that shocked human rights defenders, the group were found guilty in December of endangering the safety of an aerodrome when they prevented the deportation of sixty people to Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. The group are now appealing against the charge, which could have carried a life sentence.
Emma Hughes, one of the Stansted Fifteen, wrote in The Guardian last week that ‘having a terror-related conviction… will limit our ability to get work, to travel, and get a mortgage’.
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