In a prosecution that has been condemned by human rights groups, Alistair Tamlit and Benjamin Smoke and the other members of the so-called Stansted 15 were convicted on Monday of endangering the safety of the airport in March 2017.
The court had heard how they used lock-on devices to secure themselves around a Titan Airways Boeing 767 chartered by the Home Office, as the aircraft waited on the asphalt at the airport in Essex to remove undocumented immigrants to Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone.
After nearly three days of deliberations, following a nine-week trial, a jury at Chelmsford crown court found the defendants, all members of campaign group End Deportations, 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.
The refugees they saved had their cases reviewed, and most had their deportation orders overturned (because it turns out that the Home Office are bigots who either refuse to believe people are gay, or ignore real threats to their lives so they can meet an arbitrary deportation quota). But the jury weren't allowed to consider that, after the judge effectively directed them to convict.
And that's British "justice" for you: protesting for human rights is now "terrorism", with a penalty of life imprisonment. But if that's the case, we have a moral duty to be "terrorists", and defend human rights against an unjust, tyrannical government.