On April 29th we heard the closing defence speeches of the Filton 6 retrial, with all defendants except Sam choosing to dismiss their lawyers and represent themselves. Corner, remained represented in court, by barrister Tom Wainwright.
Here’s is Ellie’s closing speech:
Before starting, I want to reiterate what Lottie said – I didn’t fire my barrister because they’re not good, they’re amazing, and I couldn’t feel better represented by the legal team. But I think it’s really important, given the circumstances that we’re in now, that you hear from me.
It might seem strange from the outside that someone like me would do something like this. I haven’t done amazing things like Lottie or dedicated myself to activism. I’m a musician/farmer/forest school nursery teacher from Swansea, and I’ve been just living my life figuring out how to make the world a little bit less shit in my own way. I guess everyone blames their parents for everything, but I do think the way that I was raised led me to be where I am today. Credited largely to my mum, who you’ve heard a lot about and seen on the link the other day. Growing up, watching her, always going out of her way to help people as a nurse and a homeopath, treating loads of different types of people from all walks of life. She taught us – me, my brother and my little sister – how to have empathy and to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else.
I’m half-Japanese, if you hadn’t already guessed, and though my dad wasn’t always around, I grew up with a strong sense of Japanese culture. At the centre is honour – doing what is honourable, no matter how uncomfortable it may make you feel. For example, back in the day, if you were a samurai, there is a ritual known as ‘seppuku’. They would fall on their own sword if they were caught by the enemy, to restore honour or to protest injustice. I’m glad they’ve moved on from that. But how could I be raised the way that I was and watch the annihilation of human beings and do nothing? The conflict of going to work, playing and teaching young children, then going home to watch videos of similar children lose everything that makes them feel safe, is what compelled me to act in defence of those children.
You have heard a statement from Cosmo’s mum. Even though he was only three when I looked after him he’s the coolest dude that I know. He’s gentle, considerate and loves being silly – he is the centre of his mum’s world. Every one of the kids that I looked after was the centre of someone’s world – their mum, their dad, their grandparents – and to imagine what it would be like for any of them with what was happening in Palestine it literally broke me. I was sick of crying on my bed, witnessing massacres and feeling helpless. And that was the moment that I signed up to Palestine Action.
In the prosecution speech, you were told to think about the many defendants that appear before the criminal courts in this country. But you’re not here judging them, nor are you responsible for the criminal justice system, where some people are prosecuted and some people are in the Epstein files walking around free. You’re here to judge us, to decide whether I go back to prison or not.
The prosecutor told you that if you didn’t convict me, the law would be incapable of providing any protection to anyone. I don’t understand how anyone could say that in the context of this case, unless they don’t see Palestinians as human beings.
The prosecution’s whole case against us has been quite disingenuous and contradictory. The prosecutor told you yesterday that their case has just been all about damage, and it doesn’t matter who we are or why we did what we did. But many parts of the evidence that they presented weren’t about damage at all. They were about trying to discredit us as people. We spent about a day going through the sequence of events, though it felt like much longer to all of us, but how much of it was actually relevant to the issue of damage? Why did you need to know that I may have been hungover after a party? Did the homeopathy messages from my mum help you work out whether we damaged anything? And of course the video of Fatema Zainab and Lottie laughing, when they had no idea of what had just happened to Sergeant Evans. Was that there to help you work out whether we damaged anything? Obviously not. It was there to convince you that we’re bad people.
While these moments have been quietly drip-fed through the case, on the surface the prosecutor accepts that we’re people of good character. The most disingenuous part of the prosecution case has been the allegations of me intimidating security guards and resisting arrest. I am not charged with threatening anyone or resisting arrest. So if the prosecution were really so sure of their case, then they would say it, and prosecute me.
The first thing that you might have noticed about the prosecution case is that they didn’t call a single security guard to give evidence. The prosecutor asked you to see things from Volante’s perspective [described in evidence as the most violent of the Elbit security guards], and you could have. She chose not to call him or any security guard to actually give evidence, because they know that they were the ones intimidating us. And if that wasn’t true, they would have called them to the stand.
The truth is that the security guards, like Elbit itself, have been shielded and sheltered by the state.
If this was a shop that we’d broken into, which I would never do by the way, then you’d expect the owner to come to court. You’d expect him to list all of the items that were damaged, and describe the impact it’s had on his business. But where is Elbit? You’ve heard a very detailed and very boring inventory of the tools we brought to dismantle the weapons. You even have – behind Tab 10 – pictures with information like the brand and the weight and the material of every single tool. So where is that information about the weapons that we dismantled? If this case is supposedly only about damage, then where is the inventory?
And I think that brings me to the CCTV. Everything that we’ve heard about the CCTV system came second-hand from PC Sarah Grant. Once again, the prosecution did not want to put an Elbit Systems employee in front of you to answer for themselves. They know that the explanation of why there is missing footage doesn’t make sense. The low frame rate cannot explain the missing footage. You’ve seen it. We spent way longer than a minute in that alcove. No matter how low the frame rate was, it’s impossible that nobody was pictured on that camera, where Volante was being incredibly violent. Coincidentally, we don’t have any body-worn footage from the alcove either. We also don’t have CCTV of the area where Luke [another Elbit guard] had Lottie screaming on the floor, or body-worn. Or when Mr. Volante hit Jordan in the neck with a sledgehammer – you only saw that because it’s captured on police body-worn.
PC Phoebe Webber accepted that there were CCTV cameras that covered all of these areas, and we know that security all had body-worn cameras. Sarah Grant accepted that someone would have to set the frame rates, but of course, Witness Alpha [described as a senior Elbit employee whose identity has been withheld from defence lawyers] , who hasn’t been here at all, couldn’t remember the password to access the settings. Could anyone really believe that a multi-million pound weapons and technology company that specializes in surveillance drones didn’t have a CCTV system that worked?
The prosecution said yesterday that I was resisting arrest, but I’ve already explained that I was screaming in pain and fear, and I think that’s pretty clear from the footage. She told you incorrectly that my attitude towards the police is due to a conversation that I had with my mum when I was nine. In that conversation, my mum taught me that if I am afraid of a man, I should not show weakness. I should make myself loud. My distrust of the police comes from when a policeman beat my auntie up, before I was born. I don’t know what experiences others have had with the police, but different communities have different experiences with them. That just means that some of us are more afraid of them than others. It doesn’t mean that I was resisting arrest, because that would be stupid of me when Palestine Action told us over and over again not to resist arrest. And as I said in my evidence, when I said I’m complying now, I meant that a minute ago I was mid-smash, which obviously isn’t complying. When I say not complying, I mean that the six of us chose not to sit by and do nothing.
We are all very different people with very different upbringings, personalities, interests, careers and ambitions, but we are all compassionate nerds. I didn’t know any of them before this, but going through this together, we’re bonded for life, even if they don’t want to be. Somehow, being in prison, not getting proper sleep or allowed a shower or fresh air, we have kept each other sane enough to get through this. And I’ve gotten to know each of the extraordinary humans that sit in the dock over there. And whatever happens to us, I will be forever proud and grateful they are by my side.
People always ask me, do you regret it? Although I am terrified of the consequences, because I’m not a psychopath, I will never regret trying to save a child’s life. The prosecutor said we are all born with good character, and I’ve seen this first-hand working with children. Every day I would have conversations with these tiny, wonderful human beings and I’d simplify things in a way that they could understand. I got to understand that a child’s view of the world is profoundly simple – what is right and what is wrong.
This is not everything I’d like to tell you but I’m so scared of the consequences of saying something that I’m not permitted to that I can only hope that this is enough.
Yesterday the prosecutors said that we refuse to take responsibility. That’s not true. The truth is that our system puts the power in the hands of ordinary people to decide whether we’re guilty or not. For those of us that aren’t in power, we go through our lives feeling powerless and like we don’t have a choice sometimes. But today, you are the people in power and you are the ones with the choice. Regardless of who the state decides to protect, I have faith in people. And that’s why I am standing in front of you. Thank you.