Spare ‘Stansted 15’ from jail, letter urges

Public figures in Britain, including the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, and the actor Emma Thompson, have signed a letter condemning the conviction of 15 political activists who blocked the takeoff of an immigration removal charter flight.

On Monday, the group, who were members of the End Deportations campaign, were convicted under antiterror legislation of endangering the safety of Stansted airport during a protest in March 2017.

A jury at Chelmsford crown court heard how they used lock-on devices to secure themselves to a Titan Airways Boeing 767 chartered by the Home Office, as the aircraft waited to remove undocumented immigrants to Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone.

After nearly three days of deliberations, the jury found the defendants guilty of intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome. They were found guilty under the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act, a law passed in response to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

In an open letter, more than 300 signatories call for the protesters – known as the “Stansted 15” – to be spared prison, and on the government to stop its “inhumane hostile environment policies and to end its barely legal and shameful practice of deportation charter flights”.

Among those who have signed the letter are Abbott and Thompson, the shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, the author Philip Pullman, the hip-hop artist and writer Akala, the writer Alice Walker, the American political activist Angela Davis, the musicians Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel, and the TSSA general secretary, Manuel Cortes.