“People won’t let it stand”: an interview with Ellie and Lottie of the Filton 4, imprisoned as terrorists for taking direct action to prevent a genocide

On June 12, decent people in the UK and around the world who refuse to be complicit in a genocide were deeply shocked when four young activists who had taken direct action against a factory near Bristol owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, were sentenced as terrorists, despite having only been tried and convicted for criminal damage.

The judge is their case, Mr. Justice Johnson, used a revision to existing terrorism legislation that was passed under the far-right home secretary Priti Patel in 2021 to enhance their sentences because of an alleged “terrorism connection”, which was not disclosed to the jury, and was never mentioned during the trial. Making clear his subterfuge, the judge had also imposed a reporting ban regarding his intentions.

As a result, Ellie Kamio, 30, was sentenced to six years less 45 days, as was Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Head, who was also disqualified from driving for four years after her eventual release. Fatema Zainab Rajwani, 21, was sentenced to five years and eight months less 45 days, while Samuel Corner, 23, who was additionally convicted of grievous bodily harm for an attack on a policewoman while disorientated and fearing for his fellow activists’ safety, was sentenced to a combined eight years and eight months for both offences. Prosecutors had sought his conviction for GBH with intent, but the jury only recognized it as GBH without intent; a crucial distinction.

What was also clear from the sentencing was that all four defendants would be regarded, within the prison system, as “terrorists”, which would almost certainly lead to enhanced punishment. It also meant restrictions on any kind of early release for good behaviour, and it also meant that, even after their eventual release, they will be subjected to restrictions on their liberty as a result of their “terrorist” branding.

A week after the trial, the support group for the Filton 4 — part of a larger group of 25 defendants, whose trials are currently underway, or are scheduled to begin later this year — posted an urgent message notifying supporters that they had just two weeks left to send letters to the Filton 4 before new restrictions were imposed which would prevent them from receiving any kind of message from members of the public.

Subsequently, Ellie, who, in court had shouted, “In order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent”, referencing the Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul, bravely posted an extraordinarily defiant satirical post on Instagram a week ago, which I shared in a post that went viral on Facebook, with nearly 50,000 views to date.

For the most part, however, the Filton 4 are now largely cut off from the world, subjected to what is described as “an enhanced contact vetting (ECV) scheme” for “terrorist prisoners”, meaning, as Harriet Williamson of Novara Media explained in an article on July 20, that “their contact with the outside world is restricted to a maximum of 20 people, who all have to undergo vetting”, and that “only these 20 people can call, email, write to or visit them.”

The interview

Williamson spoke to Ellie, a former nursery teacher, and Lottie, a former charity worker supporting victims of domestic violence, via one of their registered contacts for an interview that sheds much-needed light on the circumstances in which they find themselves.

As Ellie said, the reason they have been given for the implementation of the ECV restrictions is “so that I won’t radicalize anyone else, which is a bullshit excuse to alienate us from the world.”

Lottie, meanwhile, called it a “further attempt to break and psychologically punish us” through isolation, and a move “to reduce our world yet further”, following the 18 months they spent on remand before their trial – “far beyond the standard legal custody time limit for unconvicted defendants”, which is six months.

Lottie explained that the ECV vetting process “can be intimidating for friends and family to go through, particularly due to fears around the potential impact on immigration status, work or simply ‘the worry of being caught in the crosshairs of the oppression we are experiencing.’”

Ellie’s mum Emma told Williamson that the ECV had “led to some tough decisions — like Ellie deciding to drop her younger sister Sadie as one of her 20 contacts, because Sadie finds visiting prison too traumatic to do regularly.”

As a result, from now on Ellie “can’t even speak to her sister on the phone.”

Emma, a Swansea-based small business owner “who was ‘traumatised’ by her own brush with counterterrorism police in connection to Ellie’s case”, added that there was additional “pressure” on the 20 chosen contacts. “People are going to get tired,” she said. As Williamson described it, “Life happens: they might go travelling, not be able to visit or not be available for phone calls. It becomes a real commitment, not for fair-weather friends.”

Lottie told Williamson that the sentencing “has actually brought me a strange sense of calm.” Acknowledging that she was the “doomsayer of the group” and “struggling to be optimistic about the sentence being remedied soon”, she said, nevertheless, “I don’t for a second believe this will stand long-term. People won’t let it.”

She added, “The UK at least purports to be a democracy, and unless the state wishes to come out as a full-throated authoritarian regime, it has to at least pretend to follow the public mood. Whether it’s in three months or three years, I do believe the terrorist connection will be quashed. My larger concern is how easily all of this has happened.”

She added that she thought of herself and her co-defendants as “just the canary in the coal mine”, adding, “I worry that, as a nation, we are too complacent about how much freedom we’ve already lost and how soon things could get much worse. I hope the wider public takes this as a wake-up call and looks to regain the rights that have been so stealthily eroded before it’s too late.”

Ellie’s mum Emma, meanwhile, told Williamson that, although everyone was “devastated” by the terrorism sentencing, “Ellie and I are not, because we’ve known this for two years.”

As she added, “Someone asked me after the sentencing, how did we get to this place? My first answer was because we complied. We didn’t speak about the terror sentencing for fear of contempt and making things worse for the defendants, but our compliance did nothing, the judge did his worst anyway.”

She was making reference to the ways in which Judge Johnson had manipulated the trial, in which, as Williamson described it, “their defence teams were banned from inviting the jury to rely on vital context around the Elbit factory raid when reaching their verdict, including the firm’s role in manufacturing weapons used in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the nature of the property defendants damaged or destroyed, and defendants’ aim of saving lives in Gaza through their actions.”

As Emma said, however, she is “grateful to still have her daughter — unlike many parents in Palestine.”

As she explained, “When I first heard that Ellie was guilty and I was in shock, my son, Billy, said to me: ‘Mum, she’s not dead.’ I suppose that’s the upside. She’s very much alive, and still standing with the people of Palestine.”

Prison

Nevertheless, the experience of being in prison as a “terrorist” is harsh. Both Ellie and Lottie are held in HMP Bronzefield, on the outskirts of Ashford in Surrey, and, as Williamson notes, “The word Ellie uses to describe prison is ‘neglect.’”

“I wouldn’t say ‘neglectful’”, she said, “because it’s not only a place that neglects people, but also a place where neglected people go.”

She also described how inmates are “dehumanised daily, multiple times a day”, and “treated like dangerous animals, not human beings”. Examples she provided were a recent dinner of a “plain jacket potato in a cup” and how “staff or officers will talk about you when you’re standing right there.”

Regarding food, Emma said that her daughter’s budget is “mostly used in the canteen” — the prison shop — “supplementing sub-par prison meals with vitamins and extras like nuts” which is important as Ellie is vegetarian. Emma also “pointed out the irony of Bronzefield’s private owner, Sodexo, also being a food services and catering company.”

After the heatwave in June, Lottie said, “Prison in a heatwave is hell on earth. In Bronzefield, you cannot open the windows in your cell. This means that, with prisoners locked up for the vast majority of the day, there is no fresh air or way of dispelling heat from the cells. It truly highlights how staff see prisoners as ‘other’, sometimes even subhuman.”

When temperatures reached 34°C in the heatwave, Lottie said, “our entire wing didn’t even have the paltry fans each cell is supposed to be furnished with”, and prisoners were “forbidden from wearing shorts more than one inch above the knee or vests with thin straps.” And that was before July’s even longer heatwave.

I hope we hear more from the Filton 4, but I’m aware that the ECV restrictions make that difficult.

We need to keep talking about them, just as we need to keep talking about the Palestinians held without charge or trial in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, or convicted in unfair military trials.

The Filton 4 were convicted and sentenced, but the judicial subterfuge involved in their convictions, and their augmented sentencing via a “terrorism connection” are blatantly unfair. The law should be amended, just as the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization should be overturned.

Something crucial about freedom depends on it.