England prides itself on its legal system, supposedly a pinnacle of fairness, neutrality and justice. 

Having faced two trials and 18 months’ incarceration before a verdict was even reached, I’ve witnessed the falsity of these claims. Today will mark another low: the lead barrister on my case, Rajiv Menon, will appear at the Royal Courts of Justice accused of contempt of court over remarks he made in a closing speech to the jury. 

If found guilty, he’ll face up to two years in prison.

This is the first time in English legal history that a barrister has been prosecuted for defending their client in this way. The Garden Chambers, where Menon is a KC, has said it is “extremely concerned about the chilling effect on the Bar of the state seeking to criminalise barristers for their representation of their clients”. The Criminal Bar Association (CBA) has warned that other lawyers are now afraid of doing their jobs.

“[They] have become uncertain and scared of what they can and can’t say; scared that somehow they might be – at the end of a trial where they have faithfully represented their client themselves – facing a charge of criminal contempt,” said Riel Karmy-Jones KC, chair of the CBA. “It is starting to feel like it’s about the politics of the subject matter of the trial, rather than the core principles of how a barrister represents his client.”

That has certainly been my experience. 

In August 2024, I entered an Israeli weapons factory in Filton, Bristol, along with other activists. We destroyed military drones created by Elbit Systems: quadcopters set to be exported for use in Israel’s illegal genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. 

Any nation found to be supporting or abetting those committing a genocide is complicit and culpable under international law; there are legal precedents that allow an offence to be committed to prevent a greater offence occurring, as we did at Filton. Yet upon arrest we were held incommunicado for almost three weeks in counter-terrorism custody, which the UN warned may amount to ‘enforced disappearance’. 

We were presented at magistrates’ court, charged with criminal damage, violent disorder and aggravated burglary. These were ordinary offences, but Judge Johnson later granted himself the right to use a ‘terrorism connection’ at sentencing. We were denied bail and imprisoned under the Terrorism Act. Johnson introduced reporting restrictions to ban the media from mentioning that, if the jury found us guilty, he could sentence us as terrorists, which would drastically lengthen our jail time and impact our futures. Jurors were also not made aware of this fact.

Despite the restrictions, media coverage of our case blew up during my 18 months in custody awaiting trial, with grand accusations made about my co-defendants and me.

In June 2025, five months before our trial, Yvette Cooper, then the home secretary, discussed her decision to proscribe Palestine Action in the Commons. She specifically acknowledged that she could not discuss our case “to avoid prejudicing future criminal trials”. Yet just moments earlier, she had referred to the “attacks at [...] Elbit Systems UK in Bristol”, saying Palestine Action had “committed acts of serious damage to property with the aim of progressing its political cause and influencing the government”.

Two months later, Cooper went further still. In an Observer article titled “Palestine Action ‘is not lawful protest’”, she referenced the charges in our case, which she said, “in the assessment of the independent Crown Prosecution Service, [had] a terrorism connection”. She also accused Palestine Action of “intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injury to individuals”.

Given that our trial had yet to take place, it seemed a case of putting the cart before the horse – and one that risked prejudicing jurors. Given Cooper’s position in government and the role she played in the legal proceedings to proscribe Palestine Action, it is inconceivable that she did not understand the reporting restrictions surrounding our trial. She has faced zero repercussions for what may amount to breaking the law on contempt of court.

For Rajiv Menon, the sole KC for the defence, it is a very different story.

At our trials, a heavy burden fell on Menon’s shoulders as he and the other defence barristers were forced to contort themselves to keep up with Johnson’s ever-increasing restrictions on what he deemed permissible as evidence.

As well as being prohibited from telling the jury about the terrorist connection, we were forbidden from referencing material the prosecution had included in its own evidence bundles. Elbit’s actions in supporting Israel’s genocide were deemed irrelevant.

In his closing speech, Menon reminded the jury of their role. He spoke about the case of Penn and Mead in 1670, which saw a jury imprisoned and fined for contempt of court after acquitting two Quakers of unlawful assembly. As Menon said, that case it is the cornerstone of the British legal system as we know it – it established the right of juries to make decisions freely and without threat of repercussions. 

Menon also spoke emotionally and passionately about my background and how I ended up involved in this action, highlighting the centrality of the Palestinian cause to my motivations. His has since been dubbed a historic speech by legal professionals and the public alike.

On 4 February, after 36 hours of deliberating, the jury found us not guilty of aggravated burglary. It was unable to reach a verdict on the other charges of criminal damage and violent disorder. Two weeks later, we were released.

Around this time, the Crown Prosecution Service announced it would seek a retrial and Johnson advised that he would refer Menon for criminal proceedings, a fact that could only be reported on last week. 

Johnson alleged Menon committed contempt of court by referencing a plaque commemorating the Penn and Mead case, which highlights “the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions”. This plaque isn’t hidden, it’s in the entryway of the Old Bailey, where our trial would have taken place had it not been for space and timetabling constraints. Our jurors would have had to pass it several times a day.

Menon was not threatened for being inaccurate; he was persecuted for jeopardising what has become a lynchpin case in the British state’s war against Palestine Action.

The crucial question is why. Why was a government minister – the home secretary, no less – allowed to publicly and repeatedly prejudice our right to a fair trial and get away scot-free, whilst a renowned human rights lawyer was punished for doing his job? 

Did the government feel the Filton defendants were too close to winning, thereby undermining its proscription claim? Did it want to issue a warning, to create a chilling effect on legal professionals and defendants in subsequent trials? Or is our legal system simply a two-tier system, where those in power are above the law and the rest of us can be punished for simply being irksome?

During our retrial earlier this year, further restrictions were placed on the scope of evidence. The jury was told that in that courtroom, Justice Johnson was the law – and in a courtroom, the law is tantamount to God. 

We were found guilty of criminal damage. We had never been charged with terrorism, yet Judge Johnson sentenced us as terrorists on 12 June. I am serving six years in prison and will face a further 15 years on notification once I am released, during which time I will have to regularly check in with the authorities, and will have to register any new device, bank account, telephone number, email address, vehicle, relationship and overseas travel plans with the police for the rest of my life.

The UK abolished the divine right of kings long ago; but it is alive and kicking in our legal system. The privileged few in the upper echelons are permitted to bend the law to breaking point to further the government’s political agenda. The same people are trying to rob the British public of the right to a jury of their peers by blaming jury trials for our backlogged court systems. It is not juries that are the problem; it is our courts that are beleaguered by pressure from those in Parliament, the intelligence services and the police. 

The Home Office has interfered with our case again and again in a bid to shore up its proscription of Palestine Action by using us as political scapegoats. Yet, for his work in defending me, my barrister may be disbarred and potentially face prison time himself.

US Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin speaks during a press conference at the G20 Ministerial meeting on Energy Abundance, in Houston, Texas, on September 14, 2026.Photo by RONALDO SCHEMIDT / AFP

With his characteristic deregulatory zeal, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced before an audience of G20 energy ministers in oil-rich Houston, Texas, that his agency would eliminate climate pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants. “For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” Zeldin said in an EPA press statement issued during the Houston meeting. “The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on.” 

This announcement was yet another example of the Trump administration’s eagerness to reinforce what Republicans have long considered a priority: freedom from government intrusion or regulation. But only a few days before Zeldin reassured energy executives that the government would no longer prioritize protecting public health, the EPA announced a new study that would test the country’s water supply for abortion medication, contraception, and hormones used in gender-affirming care, along with over 1,000 other medications and chemicals. “We have heard loud and clear that Americans are concerned about potential unknown pollutants lurking in their drinking water,” Zeldin wrote in the study press release.

“The Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”

The testing of abortion medication has been championed by anti-abortion groups for years, especially by Kristan Hawkins, the leader of Students for Life, who tweeted a video of herself receiving the news that the study was made public. In her post, she wrote: 

“BREAKING: The EPA will now test water for abortion pill pollution!! The FDA has recklessly, negligently allowed chemical abortion pills on the market and deregulated them. They’ve killed millions of babies, harmed mothers, and polluted our water for 26 years. For the last year, we’ve been calling on President Trump’s EPA to find out what’s in our water. After more than three years of innovative water testing, a peer-reviewed research paper, and the introduction of legislation in states, the Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”

The EPA’s unrelated but tandem announcements reveal an agency that has fundamentally overhauled its policies toward environmental and human health in pursuit of the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” and “Make America Healthy Again” agendas. Rolling back power plant pollution standards will lead to higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels, as well as increased levels of smog, mercury, and lead contamination, which can cause health problems. 

Coal and natural gas-fueled power plants are the second-largest carbon polluter in the United States, behind the transportation sector. Under the Biden administration, carbon pollution rules for power plant emissions standards would have reduced carbon emissions by 1.38 billion metric tons by 2047. The recently announced plan will repeal these Biden-era regulations and could prevent future administrations from curbing carbon emissions. First reported by Bloomberg News, the EPA’s latest move caps off a year and a half of the agency’s overhaul of federal climate policy. In February, the EPA rescinded similar climate vehicle standards and the 2009 endangerment finding, the landmark ruling that asserted greenhouse gases threaten human health.

Much to the dismay of anti-abortion activists, the number of abortions in the United States has actually increased since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. One reason for this has been access to abortion medication, the two-drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that act to terminate pregnancies. This has activated the anti-abortion movement to find new approaches to ending the procedure, and one of them has been environmental: focusing on the alleged presence of these medications in the water supply.

After Republican lawmakers urged the EPA to take up the water study in June, Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The 19th that, compared to other pharmaceuticals, mifepristone is taken as a one-time dose by a small portion of the population. “There are legitimate water quality threats that we need to attack and rectify in a regulatory manner,” Donley said. “And then there are things that are out in left field that just distract people.” 

Meanwhile, monitoring the water supply—which Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote will “give Americans the truth about what is in their water”—may actually co-opt environmental policy to pursue anti-abortion policy. “I am deeply concerned,” Betsy Southerland, a former career scientist in EPA’s Office of Water, told Politico. “If there is any detectable level of mifepristone or its metabolites, the anti-abortion groups will scream that we are unknowingly aborting fetuses by drinking public tap water.” 

According to Politico, the EPA insists the study will only determine if a chemical is present in the water supply, not its concentration. But pro-choice activists caution that the study could still pave the way for abortion access restrictions. “If the test finds any trace of abortion pills, conservatives will use it to legitimize their new legal front in the war on reproductive rights,” wrote activist and writer Jessica Valenti on her Substack, Abortion, Every Day. “The cruelty really is the point here, not science or health.” 

As for the EPA’s other effort? Environmental groups are already planning their legal challenges to the EPA’s latest climate policy rollback. “The Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, told The Guardian. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”