I Was Right to Damage “Maytime”, Claims Accused Woman Angie Zelter is another John Mclean, Says Advocate
At the end of the second week of the Greenock jury trial of three peace activists for damaging a research laboratory connected to the Trident nuclear weapons system, the defendants and their supporters are encouraged by the progress of the trial so far.
The Crown case closed yesterday after the final witness Iain McPhee, bargemaster of Maytime, was grilled by defence advocates John Mayer and John McLaughlin. The case against the women can be summed up as: they went out to the barge Maytime; they threw as much as they could in the water and hammered everything else relevant they could find. The jury had a preview of the core of the defence case last Friday when expert witness Professor Francis Boyle was allowed to give his evidence early due to his international commitments. As a world authority on international law he was able to tell the jury that there was absolutely no doubt that Trident was illegal and that the women had every right to do what they did.
Today (Friday 8th October), one of the defendants, Angie Zelter, began her own defence from the witness box. She told the jury that her action on the 8th June was not vandalism or terrorism. She had tried every other reasonable method to prevent nuclear catastrophe and there was no other legal alternative than to take direct action against Trident. She had been profoundly affected by the long history of suffering and death caused by the testing and detonation of nuclear weapons and profoundly alarmed by the scale and frequency of accidents within the system.
She had gradually come to know of the growing legal case against nuclear weapons. There were two basic principles on which this depended: the absolute need for any weapon of war to avoid making civilians the object of attack and the need to avoid unnecessary suffering to combatants. She outlined the 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice and quoted the powerful words of Judge Weeramantry: “One wonders whether in the light of common sense, it can be doubted that to exterminate vast numbers of the enemy population, to poison their atmosphere, to induce in them cancers, keloids and leukemias, to cause congenital defects and mental retardation in large numbers of unborn children, to devastate their territory and render their food unfit for human consumption –whether such acts as these can conceivably be compatible with “elementary consideration of humanity”’
She was about to deal with the specific case of the lawfulness of Britain’s Trident system when the court adjourned until Tuesday 12th October.
Advocate John Mayer said:
“The great John McLean appealed to the humanity of the jury from the dock.
Listening to Angie Zelter today I would say she was the John McLean of our
time.”