At the Assange extradition hearings in Woolwich Crown Court and the Old Bailey, the public gallery was limited to five and sometimes two. The excuse was Covid. But online access was denied to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and numerous other groups and individuals, including journalists. The mainstream media was anyway complicit in leaving the entire hearing virtually unreported – less than one percent of the coverage given to Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard.
The International Court of Justice met at the Hague to consider Israeli genocide, and the entire proceedings were open to anybody in the world with a decent video connection, through an open link and no password. Like the crucial Assange appeal hearings coming in the High Court on 21 and 21 February, the ICJ is a public court. Yet the judges of the London High Court have passed a series of Kafkaesque regulations to limit who can see the trial, under the pretext of open access.
Here is the Stalinist nonsense in its entirety. I promise your mind is going to boggle:
Remember, as that document says, this is a “public hearing”. You have to apply for permission to watch it and state WHY you want to watch it. Presumably “It is a public hearing. By law it has to be public” is not a sufficient reason. There is no guarantee at all that you will be given permission.
You have to be in England or Wales to watch. Applications from Scotland and Northern Ireland will “not normally be granted”. Despite the fact it is the UK government which is extraditing Julian under a UK–USA extradition treaty, not an England and Wales–USA extradition treaty.
Julian is an Australian citizen. But you are not “normally” permitted to watch in Australia. It is the United States government which is seeking to extradite Julian. But citizens of the United States will not “normally” be permitted to view online.
Scots and Irish will not be permitted to view, presumably because their loyalty to the security state is known to be dubious! I have no idea what is the position for the Channel Islands or Isle of Man.
Not only does the Big Brother state want to know your identity and where you are, nobody else is allowed to watch the hearing with you. Why? What harm is it if your mum looks at it? It is a public f***ing hearing.
Who are they scared is going to watch? Why does that scare them? What do they think these naughty people watching are going to do? Are they worried Putin and Xi will be secretly watching and will do some terrible internet magic that collapses the western world? Just what is this crazy restriction about?
Why is nobody outside the state and billionaire media allowed to give live information about what is happening in the Court? Why is it OK if CNN does give live information, but not OK if a concerned citizen does it?
Why does everybody have to be threatened with two years’ imprisonment if they break these crazy rules?
I urge everybody reading this post to contact the court as specified at [email protected], and apply to watch online, following the rules in para 4 of the court order above. If you are outside the UK, please include in your reasons that the United States is making explicitly in this case a claim of universal jurisdiction for its Espionage Act over the whole world, so everybody is affected including you.
Please then put out on social media that you have applied, and encourage others to apply. Please post updates when you hear back from the court including stating regularly if they don’t reply. Post any answer you get. And go back to them and argue.
Officially this is a “public hearing”. Officially these judges are committed to “open justice”. What a farce. What are they hiding?
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Were justice to be done they would be happy that it be seen to be done. The corollary to that applies here, I fear.
You’re sadly very likely right.
But then, there can be a backlash to this poorly disguised censorship.
They don’t seem to be aware of the Streisand effect…
On that subject, this would appear to be particularly relevant: https://www.barandbench.com/columns/the-origins-of-justice-must-be-seen-to-be-done
(Read the whole article)
@Admin does the precedent highlighted in that article help in any way?
Has Assange’s legal team officially accepted the legitimacy of this Kafkaesque dictat?
This form of state secrecy is exactly why Julian invented Wikileaks in the first place. No other human being on earth, not even a terrorist, has ever been treated by a government with such contempt, for him, and for the jurisdictions, and human and civil rights that are supposed to be protecting him.
I am dumbfounded, speechless, sad for all of us.
Keir Starmer had the oversight, and had a subordinate say to the prosecution, “Don`t dare to back down”. Can`t provide the quote at the moment, I`m afraid, but this is the most egregious example of judicial corruption since, well, the last one. C.f. Craig Murray, Alec Salmond etc. See Joshua Silver on the meaning of “rights”. We don`t have any, they are political whims. It is said that Julian is dying, so is morality.
Keep on keeping on, there are lots of us.
I believe the quote in the CPS’s missive to the Swedish prosecutors was: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet!’, Paul.
I’ve just looked it up, and found that the exact quote was: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!’ – with three exclamation marks, like a 12-year-old texting her BFF to tell her that her old man has just got hold of three tickets to see Justin Bieber at Manchester Arena on his 2013 ‘Believe’ Tour and it’s ‘gonna b amazing!!!’
Amen!
Ah, the blue skies of British democracy! Westminster presides over more restrictions than Russia. The courts are part of that system.
It will get worse under Trilateral man Sir Keir Starmer, guaranteed.
It will get worse under either the Tories or Starmer, not exclusively the latter.
it doesn’t surprise me that the kind of people who invented Schrodinger’s Skipals – are they dead? are they alive? we simply don’t know till we open the box, and WE ARE NOT GOING TO OPEN THE BOX – have also invented this “vetting” process.
Mention of the Skripals raises the matter of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, which is nth times more secretive as the wording of the link to John Helmer’s report of Feb 6th shows, and which is also the title of the article. I have not seen these snail pace proceedings being reported by the UK media. That they are of public interest there is no doubt but the secrecy means that the Sturgess family will never know the truth.
https://johnhelmer.net/batting-in-the-dark-lord-hughes-orders-the-novichok-public-inquiry-to-turn-into-a-secret-farce-before-the-public-hearings
Any secrecy associated with the case of poor Dawn Sturgess is a clear indication that Porton Down WAS involved.
I don’t think so, or at least not until subsequent to the event. The whole thing seems to me to be an unfortunate unrelated death which became associated with “Novichok” through mass media hype and overzealous spooks. It became impossible to back down once it was “taken seriously”.
Steven Newbury: yes, from the start my impression too has been that there is little or no evidence that Dawn Sturgess died from ‘Novichok’, and that it is possible or even likely that she died from fentanyl poisoning (one of many who have suffered that fate) or from an overdose of some other widely available drug. Now that the inquest has been replaced by a ‘public’ enquiry (which, as Craig may be able to confirm, can, unlike an inquest, be held in secrecy) neither we nor Dawn’s relatives will ever know what happened to her.
A major problem for the authorities with the Skripal event was that nobody died, so nobody could be charged with murder. Dawn conveniently filled the gap.
Even if Charlie Rowley had found a bottle of Novichok discarded by ‘Boshirov’ & ‘Petrov’, Coldish [narrator: he almost certainly didn’t], under English law, the most they could be charged with in that case would be gross negligence manslaughter.
Yes that’s part two coming soon
It is quite incredible how Orwellian the UK has become. Deliberately and obstructively preventing citizens from witnessing a public trial is obviously the antithesis of any claim to be democratic, open or accountable, and as Craig says, begs the question of what terrible injustice they wish to prevent us all from seeing. The mainstream media will of course happily oblige in not reporting anything of merit, merely the headline the government want that he is extradited. The reasons and justifications for such a draconian verdict, which defies the UK’s own laws and precedents are obviously ones which the authorities do not wish to be exposed publicly, or challenged, and they are following the new zionist examples of declaring anyone who might question them as an enemy of the state. If there were ever an example of how the state is an apparatus separate and distinct from any form of restraint – legally, morally or politically – this is it. The former principle of democracies – the separation of powers, which guarantees a system of checks and balances – is moribund and clearly an impediment to the wishes of the establishment, who now feel free to act as secret police, secret judges and secret trials, especially ones whose outcome is preordained and already decided. To think they used to mock closed societies where there were no independent judiciaries or press – now, as Ai Wei Wei (who knows a thing or two about state censorship) said, they eagerly adopt the Orwellian Big Brother approach – with no shame, no pushback and no accountability to anyone or any institution.
How shameful to live in such a backward society with so little opposition to the New Order, save of course a handful of brave souls like Craig.
To be fair, this neither a “new” example, nor exclusive to Zionists – or even all Zionists.
They have obviously given up altogether on trying to con the citizens and the rest of the world. All pretence of freedom, democracy, or the rule of law had been abandoned.
Apparently all their efforts nowadays are going into trying to decide whether Huxley, Orwell, or Kafka is the better manual of operations to follow.
Being in Portugal for the duration, I very much doubt that I would be eligible to view this proceeding. The conditions all seem to specifically exclude anyone outside the UK watching it, even if they are a English/ Welsh national.
Obviously they want to be able to screen the watchers, and keep as many capable reporters / live tweeters out as possible. Because, as you have reported from your own eye witness, what they do in there is simply shameful.
But my guess is that the Scotland ban was especially for YOU, dear Craig Murray, and Ireland got thrown in as some kind of weak disguise (a kind of human shield). They are so incompetent they didn’t check their records to see that you are currently in exile. Or maybe they seek to tempt you back in person, so that they can find some kind of excuse to throw you in jail again.
If this didn’t have such dark implications it would almost be funny.
I suspect that the USA government has put a lot of pressure on the UK to put as many restrictions as possible on the proceedings to prevent the live flow of information that happened with some of the previous extradition hearings which were immediately picked up on social media and by live analysts like Kevin Gostola from the Dissenter following the case remotely. It sounds as if the USA wants to dry up the flow of information so that it can contain the inevitable backlash that will follow when the judges turn down the appeal, which is the more likely result. I think Judge Johnson must be the same one who heard Graham Philips’s appeal against his sanctions and after slaloming around issues of free expression and all that decided that governmental interests prevailed over freedom of expression. If there was a likelihood of Julian being released on the basic of the verdict I doubt if these restrictions would be imposed as they would want to trumpet British justice as loudly as they could to the world at large. The smell of stitch up cannot be avoided.
Is there any point putting together a concise campaign video about this? Maybe even one that apes the style of a Government ad (à la “factcheckUK”) just encouraging the public to apply…
Would LedByDonkeys be able to help?
It sounds like they don’t want anybody there who doesn’t follow the narrative, and publish it the way they want it to look, that look is one that they want all of us to believe that everything is above board, someone like you Craig who would report back honestly like you did with the Salmond trial and the ICJ report, they probably won’t let you gain access.
The fit up of Assange continues.
Well they are very silly people which maybe due to the private education system which is very odd, but they are becoming sillier and sillier. I feel extremely sorry for the people who have to rely on this system of – is it justice? And people like Julian Assange who are trapped in it. I watch the ICJ hearings on Gaza which was assessible on my computer through the UN website without any problem whatsoever. It was extremely informative and impressive. South Africa was magnificent. But that is what they are afraid of isn’t it. We all watch the case against Julian Assange and most likely we see that there isn’t a case at all – it’s all made up and probably very badly. Compared to the South African delegations searing intellectual analysis and presentation which showed us all the horrifying extent of the genocide in Gaza and the overwhelming strength of their argument. Sadly. for Julian Assange, lack of public scrutiny, including media scrutiny allows the judgment to be based on very little. No matter how good and diligent and convincing Julian’s defense arguments are no one will be allowed to hear them to call the judge to account. I hope the judge has more integrity than I fear and will free Julian.
I very much doubt they’ll listen to this.
“GENEVA (6 February 2024) – The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, today urged the Government of the United Kingdom (UK) to halt the possible extradition of Julian Assange to the United States of America.
She called on British authorities to consider Julian Assange’s appeal based on substantial fears that, if extradited, he would be at risk of treatment amounting to torture or other forms of ill-treatment or punishment.
“Julian Assange suffers from a long standing and recurrent depressive disorder. He is assessed as being at risk of committing suicide. In the United States, he faces numerous charges, including under the Espionage Act of 1917 for alleged unlawful releases of diplomatic and other cables and documents via WikiLeaks. If extradited, he could be detained in prolonged isolation while awaiting trial, or as an inmate. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison,” Edwards said.
“The risk of being placed in prolonged solitary confinement, despite his precarious mental health status, and to receive a potentially disproportionate sentence raises questions as to whether Mr. Assange’s extradition to the United States would be compatible with the United Kingdom’s international human rights obligations, particularly under article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as respective articles 3 of the UN Convention against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights,” the Special Rapporteur said.
“Diplomatic assurances of humane treatment provided by the Government of the United States are not a sufficient guarantee to protect Mr. Assange against such risk,” Edwards said. “They are not legally binding, are limited in their scope, and the person the assurances aim to protect may have no recourse if they are violated.”
“I call on the Government of the United Kingdom to carefully review Mr. Assange’s extradition order with a view to ensuring full compliance with the absolute and non-derogable prohibition of refoulement to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and to take all the necessary measures to safeguard Mr. Assange’s physical and mental health,” the expert said.
A final domestic appeal after a long-running legal battle on Assange’s extradition is scheduled to take place before the High Court in London on 20-21 February.
Julian Assange faces 18 criminal counts in the United States for his alleged role in unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents related to national defence, including evidence exposing alleged war crimes. He has been detained in the UK since 2019, where he is currently being held at Belmarsh prison.”
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/un-special-rapporteur-torture-urges-uk-government-halt-imminent-extradition
With the UK Government’s track record you can be sure they’ll ignore it.
Here is a convenient way around this Stalinist, draconian system to get the zoom link:
1) Make sure you can send emails from you phone
2) Scan the below QR code with your phone
3) In the created email, scroll down to the message body and enter your name and email address and send it.
QR code here:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPJqV5Bpo4FzpNU3dtL5DmQKLXUfydhMfZAHSa6CtuT7m/qrcode.webp
Share far and wide.
Whilst this may be well intentioned, it’s worth mentioning that people should beware scanning random QR codes from people/orgs they don’t know; malicious ones can be and are used to spread malware.
The code says this:
[email protected]?subject=Case Number: Ac-2022-Lon-001745 And 1746&body=Dear Sir or Madam,
RE: Julian Paul Assange -V- Government Of The United States Of America -V- Secretary Of State For The Home Department
I request to be granted permission to observe the proceedings by way of an audio-visual link of case number: Ac-2022-Lon-001745 And 1746 regarding the appellant’s renewed application for permission to appeal being listed on the Hearing on 20 and 21 February 2024.
As conditioned please find the following information of mine in order to grant this permission:
(a) My full name: ________
(b) My email address: ________
(c) Confirmation that yes, I will be located within the jurisdiction of England and Wales at all times when attending the Hearing remotely
(d) In support of the request, I would like to state that open justice is a legal principle that requires that judicial proceedings be conducted in a transparent manner and with the oversight of the people, so as to safeguard the rights of those subject to the power of the court and to allow for the scrutiny of the public in general. The principle is viewed as an underlying or core principle in British law. It has a long history dating back hundreds of years, and it has been traced to decisions made before the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. Today the concept is so widely accepted that there is a general presumption that there should be judicial openness, such that openness is the rule, with secret or obscured proceedings being considered as exceptions needing to be justified.
(e) I confirm that I agree and undertake to the Court that, if permitted to attend the Hearing remotely, I will not make a recording, capture Images, and/or broadcast any part of the proceedings. I understand that to do so may be an offence and/or contempt of court, punishable by imprisonment and/or a fine. I will abide by any directions given to me by the Court during the Hearing. I agree and undertake to the Court that I will not provide the link that I am given to access the Hearing to any other person.
I look forward to receiving a reply granting me permission to observe the proceedings. Please email me the audio-visual link to attend.
Best regards,
Very usefull.
I’m a bit more of a dinosaur but I’ve cut and pasted it into an email and will send it later
Done
What will it take before the general Public understands that we, the West, are also the “bad guys”?
Ah, so this is ‘open justice’. I wonder what ‘closed justice’ is like?
Needless to say, this is just their way of showing their contempt for Julian’s supporters, and is straight out of the fascists playbook.
And I think we can safely assume that none of the MSM will be reporting on this ‘open justice’!
The words “Star Chamber” come to mind.
Is there any point in writing to our respective MPs and the Justice Secretary to ask why we in Scotland should be excluded from a public hearing in any courtroom in the UK ?
Hmmm, a lot of e-mails to deal with apparently….
Will the London High Court also have a public gallery for these upcoming Assange hearings?
Obviously Mr Murray has a special interest in availability online from outside The UK as he’s currently in exile, but it’s really not a given that “public” hearing necessarily means “publicly broadcast” hearing. More usually in The UK, “public” hearing should mean public to anybody who can be bothered to turn up and sit through it.
Perhaps the UK system is behind the times in this media age and all should be broadcast in the name of public access and accountability, but that’s absolutely not the current state, Kafkaesque, Stalinist or otherwise.
Except that they are “broadcasting” it, just in a very limited manner and the limitations absolutely are Kafkaesque.
Yes. They are clearly trying to keep the same kind of control of the online participants as they would of participants sitting in the public gallery – no recording, etc. I agree it’s pretty nonsensical. They’ll be demanding a dress code and no snacks next.
But my point is that this isn’t necessarily to do with extra sensitivities or hidden agendas surrounding Assange. They’ve been debating the broadcast of UK court proceedings for years and years, and currently I think there are only a few judge’s summaries and verdicts provided. You don’t get whole trials televised, no matter how much public interest there is in a case, and they’re also, in theory, “public” hearings.
The Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard case mentioned by Mr Murray above was broadcast from The US, but perhaps provides more arguments against the practice than for. It certainly highlights the difference between the public being very interested in a case and there being an important “public interest”. Assange is perhaps the opposite, though, where the “public interest” is arguably huge and yet a depressingly small portion of the public actually appear at all interested.
For the Lockerbie trial a Scottish Court was set up within a disused USAF base in the Netherlands. There was a public gallery, but with huge public interest and with the next of kin of 270 murder victims to be expected to want to attend, an arrangement was made for the proceedings to be videoed in real-time. Special viewing rooms were set up, one in Lockerbie Town Hall and a much larger one in New York. The video feed was not available anywhere else in the UK or the US, nor anywhere else in the world
Entrance was very strictly limited to registered next of kin only. There too there were the strictures that no recordings were to be made. Additionally, daily transcripts were issued by email to authorised next of kin, also with a stricture that those emails were not to be copied to any unauthorised person. I leave it to the reader to consider whether that email restriction prevented those emails from escaping into the wild.
In my non-legally-qualified opinion, the trial was a monstrous miscarriage of justice. A ghastly stain on the reputation of Scottish Justice in every way.
The MSM coverage was very heavily distorted. Allegations made by the prosecution were headlined as statements of fact. The Crown Office put up an “advisor” to the media to “interpret” the proceedings. It turned out that the guy had just retired from a full career in SIS (MI6) and was posing as a professor from Glasgow University.
The Lockerbie trial was an excellent example of a dramatic production carefully designed to resemble a legal trial, but in which the outcome was absolutely predetermined.
In the UK, as in the USA, the intended separation of powers has collapsed. The judiciary has become the servant of the executive, and the legislature has been relegated to a comfortable retirement home where the lucky few can have agreeable discussions about how to spend the people’s money, while creaming off a fair percentage for themselves.
This corresponds to the observable fact that the executive attracts those who lust after power, while the legislature is more for those who prefer a quiet, comfortable life with a guaranteed income. As for the judiciary, who knows? Maybe it caters for a smaller class of people who like dressing up and being able to condemn honest journalists to prison if they dislike what they report. “Better to be a big fish in a small pond…”
Tom Welsh: ‘…the outcome was absolutely predetermined’. I’m not so sure. The second defendant, Lamin Kalifa Fhimah, was acquitted. Was that also predetermined? What I’ve read suggests to me that the judges had been prejudiced to find a guilty verdict for both defendants but were so offended by the blatant lies told in court by the chief witness against Fhimah, Majid Giaka, that they changed their mind about Fhimah.
The Lockerbie triial should of course have been a jury trial, not a kangaroo court with a panel of establishment judges.
Lies were also told about Megrahi. For example by the Maltese shopkeeper who was paid a coupla million bucks for his co-operation.
The indictment against Megrahi and Fhima was “That they conspired together to cause the explosion”.
Lord Advocate Andrew Hardie hand-picked his own judges for the trial for which he was, at the time, going be the Chief Prosecutor.
Almost comically, they found Fhima not guilty of conspiring with Megrahi while finding Megrahi guilty of conspiring with Fhima. The sound of one hand clapping?
And I see some significance which is relevant to the Assange proceedings. When the Lockerbie indictment was read out to the media, it was simultaneously read by the then Lord Advocate in Edinburgh and by his US counterpart in New York. They were clearly in lockstep, like a poodle with its master.
Legal observers at the trial were taken aback to see that US Justice Dept lawyers were present in the well of the Court and were very frequently seen whispering instructions to the Scottish prosecution advocates.
I look forward to Britain’s Independence Day from America.
Thanks, Ebenezer, for reminding us of those points, particularly the ‘conspiracy of one’. The whole prosecution case was so absurd it should never have reached a court.
Reasonable, Coldish. But I feel the “predetermined” aspect was that some Libyan be found guilty. One Libyan or two didn’t really matter at all. Except that, even though the court convicted only one Libyan, it also maligned Colonel Qadafi who was assumed to have ordered the whole thing.
If you can somehow manage to put your moral sense to sleep for a while, it’s possible to admire – aesthetically – the skill with which the Washington and Tel-Aviv creatures manage to dovetail all their goals. Exonerate Israel – check. Blame Libya – check. Keep the CIA’s name out of it – check. And *** don’t mention the Iranian Airbus shot down by USS “Vincennes”!*** It’s like a game of chess between grandmasters, with human lives as the pawns.
Better to be a cold fish with a big house, Tom
If large numbers of people apply to see the video link then no doubt that in itself will be a reason not to provide access. “We were swamped with too much mail and were unable to process it all by the artificial deadline.”
It is worth remembering that the so-called ‘security services’, Special Branch MI5 etc. do not exist to protect the state’s citizens (or rather the King’s subjects – we are not citizens in the UK – we are feudal serfs).
Rather, they exist to protect the state FROM its citizens (or feudal serfs).
Similarly, the police are “His Majesty’s Constabulary” and the Courts are feudal remnants of the Royal Prerogative: Crown Courts (England); The Crown Office (in Scotland) ; His Majesty’s justices.
What the state (which really means the ruling classes and those plutocrats who own them) fears most is the justified anger and retribution of the people (whom they always refer to as ‘the mob’). Hence increasing restrictions on public assembly and demonstrations.
A vital part of that is to restrict knowledge and information – hence the billionaire press and the state broadcaster.
We must never buy the idea that we live in a democracy; all that stuff is mere performance art.
And hence the utter imperative to deal with Assange behind firmly closed doors.
Pedantically, in feudalism there are many categories of subjects, including the Peers, and in England, the mobility of commoners was somewhat restricted, no vagrancy etc., but I do not recall serfs.
I assume that you are a commoner, while the day-to-day affairs are under Parliamentary supremacy, Parliament being a self-perpetuating group dominated by cliques that wax and wane to the satisfaction of the Monarch.
Piotr, there were villeins in England in the 13th/14th century – these individuals are generally described as serfs
“Villein – One of a class of feudal serfs who held the legal status of freemen in their dealings with all people except their lord.”
it is amazing how the courts can be manipulated by western governments, see how quickly the ICC moved to start proceedings against Putin [less than 5 days] and an indictment and arrest warrant within 12 months, whereas the Palestinians have been waiting for nearly 20 years for an investigation into Israeli illegal settlements in OPT contrary to 49[6] Geneva conventions. It may never happen.
Putin’s indictment has been used by Western Politicians as an instrument to demonize Russia, when all the facts unearthed by Max Blumenthal’s investigation prove the children went to Russia voluntarily with the consent of their parents for various reasons, not least to get them out of a war zone.
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/31/iccs-putin-arrest-state-dept-report/
This manipulation is a direct result of the .Rules based order followed instinctively by US vassals, this US business model is being used worldwide, the largest resistance comes from Russia [who have a larger nuclear weapons stockpile than the US], the US simply confiscated $300 billion dollars in Russian Foreign reserves then simply said ‘what are you going to do about it, you schumcks’. The Saudi investments in the US [Bonds, Real Estate etc] are probably in the trillions? Should the Saudis send in their camel corps?
harry Law.
Harry, you might want to read this.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/07/robert-parry-vindicated-on-mh-17-reporting/
Thanks RoS, another excellent artlcle from Robert Parry in 2015 Crimean’s keep saying no to Ukraine. https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/22/crimeans-keep-saying-no-to-ukraine/ This debunks the lie that Crimean’s did not want union with Russia.
Thanks back Harry for the link its a keeper.
This is worth a read as well.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/11/02/the-obama-regimes-plan-to-seize-the-russian-naval-base-in-crimera/
Wish there was someone with the time and money to appeal this order, or bring a JR of it.
The less they allow transparency the more they reveal of their own corruption.
Seems that the Court correctly (?!) view folks outside England and Wales as furriners who should not put their noses into activities of an ENGLISH court. Colonials from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Falklands etc. should know their place.
Curiously, although I live in England I am Scottish. At any rate, both my parents were Scots, and all their parents, and…
I wasn’t allowed to vote in the independence referendum because I don’t live in Scotland. But, although a consarned furriner, I am able – in theory – to witness the proceedings of this English court.
Tom, unfortunately I think you are a Sassenach, I could be wrong.
Merriam-Webster
The meaning of SASSENACH is a typical Englishman or something considered typical of England —often used disparagingly by Scots and Irish.
However in my opinion you are not a typical Englishman, you are far too clever.
The more I see of this government and the one to come the more I am thinking
that like The Supreme Court of the UK ( I didn’t know that we are a Republic now.) that we are going to see a piss poor copy of the US’s Homeland Security Act in the UK and possibly in the EU.
The technocrats in the EU and the Special relation shippers in the UK have fell for the old Bogeyman nonsense yet again that the Russian/Communist hordes are going take over our Food Banks/Skint Local Authorities/low paid employment/ poor housing/ crap welfare system and the creme de la creme lack of dentists.
All this can be theirs if they invade.
In order to protect these Jewels In the Crown a lot of money has to be spent on keeping the invaders at bay.
Here’s the bad news:
Imagine pitching Great Britain as an investment vehicle and you could buy it.
As a capitalist how much would you pay for it?
Remembering that its National debt is 2.5 Trillion Pounds with nothing to show for it and
the current Board of Directors are useless and the future Board will still be useless.
The alleged invaders have no intention of invading – investing and trade ( something that the current capitalists don’t do ) yes but a takeover bid by arms is not and will not be on the cards now or in the future.
There are only two things that keep the UK up the charts: Those are Finance Capital and Private Housing – apart from that the UK has nothing else to offer as Thatcher de- industrialised the UK years ago and replaced it with ‘ Services’ meaning not much productive material manufacturing anymore.
Sir Kier has his work cut out.
I’ll rephrase that: He will do absolutely nothing to change the status quo and that’s why the UK needs its own Homeland Security Act because the fallout from not changing anything is unrest and protest.
This is a British version of the ‘ Lawfare ‘ to come.
What puzzles me is how the authorities will be able to tell, firstly whether you are who you say you are and secondly whether you are where you say you are. It seems pretty certain that somebody is going to capture the live feed and then it will be all over the internet.
“Are they worried Putin and Xi will be secretly watching?”
No. Of course their people will be watching – they have the best hackers in the world. Like all of our state secrecy it’s not about keeping things from our supposed ‘enemies’. They already know everything worth knowing. It’s all about preventing the British people from knowing the illegality and corruption occurring in plain sight. A task aided by the complicit media.