Remember His Honour Judge Bathurst-Norman? He's the one who presided over the acquittal a group of activists who broke into an arms factory in Brighton, causing £187,000 worth of damage to equipment they believed was bound for Israel. The jury acquitted the men following the Judge's extraordinary summing-up which was, in effect, just a lengthy expression of the Judge's own aggressively anti-Israel views and his undisguised sympathies for anyone attacking anything to do with Israel.
For a full analysis of Bathurst-Norman's grotesque judgment, I can do no better than direct you to this excellent piece: "The Judge Who Thought He Was Defence Counsel".
Not only were the Judge's views politically facile and misleading, they were also entirely irrelevant to the case in issue which was whether a group of people should have been criminally punished for subjecting a lawful British business to a thuggish attack. As far as I remember from Bar School, there isn't an "Israel exclusion" in the law of criminal damage.
Well anyway, at last some common sense reigns!
Yesterday, the Office for Judicial Complaints has announced that "His Honour" has been formally reprimanded his unprofessional behaviour.
This is extremely good news for anyone that cares about proper standards of justice, the rights of British businesses to trade lawfully without being subject to attacks on their property and, by the by, correcting the notion that the poisonous demonisation of Israel (and Israel alone) in our state institutions and public discourse is anything other than completely unacceptable.
[Hat tips: AJCD, FH]
