A protester from Brighton who was convicted for her part in preventing a deportation flight from taking off has lodged an appeal against her conviction.
Lyndsay Burtonshaw, 28, a research associate at the School of Global Studies at Sussex University, was one of 15 protesters who halted the flight from Stansted airport in March 2017.
They all denied endangering an aircraft contrary to the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990.
The protesters, known as the Stansted 15, are all appealing after being convicted last month at the end of a nine-week trial at Chelmsford Crown Court.
They cut their way through a fence and locked themselves to each other around a Boeing 767 aircraft.
The aircraft had been chartered by the Home Office to repatriate people from British detention centres to Ghana and Nigeria.
After their appeal was lodged this week, lawyer Raj Chada, a partner at solicitors Hodge, Jones and Allen, which represents them, said that they had been convicted under counter-terrorism legislation passed in response to the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.
The activists said that they were “guilty of nothing more than intervening to prevent harm”.
Raj Chada said: “The conviction of the Stansted 15 was a travesty of justice that needs correcting in the appeal courts.
“It is inexplicable how these protesters were charged with this legislation and even more so that they were found guilty.
“It is our strongly held belief that charging them with this offence was an abuse of power by the attorney general and the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service).
“It is only right and fitting that this wrongful conviction is overturned.”
He said that the defendants faced sentences up to and including life imprisonment when sentenced in the week starting Monday 4 February.
travesty of justice? bollox
Probably a lefty who lives in affordable housing.
Hope she loses her job at the university…. Utter disgrace anyone should think what they did was acceptable. We have laws in this country to protect people being deported with no cause and some to stop lunatics causing disruption at airports. A good stiff sentence may deter others.
Send her down and send them back!
So the law was broken in the form of trespass and costly damage caused in an exercise to prevent a legal process from taking place. As someone allegedly of some academic ability in a position of some institutional responsibility, I suspect you are somewhat delusional in your ambition young lady.
If you don’t like the process, enter law and do what you can to change it!