A day in court

Charity  is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don’t go hungry, unschooled or sick, without care. (Bill Moyers)

In the first week of December 1990 I was at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London. The case of six men imprisoned for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings had been sent back to the court of appeal. The appeal began on Tuesday in the first week of December at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. It was a miserable December day. Getting to the Royal Courts on the Strand was an ordeal. Apart from the sleet and snow there were security alerts all over the transportation system.

After a few days of hearings the case was adjourned until the following February. The weather was inclement all that week. On the day the appeal was postponed, the men were sent back to prison. They had been in prison already for seventeen years. They were distraught but resilient. Their families, wives, children, brothers, sisters and friends went home distressed and those of us involved in their campaign for justice were deeply disappointed not just at the postponement but the fact that the men could not have been allowed to go home with their families until the appeal resumed.

Trudging up to the tube station at Leicester Square to catch the Northern Line on a snowy, dark and dank London winter’s evening I felt miserable not so much with the weather and the callous postponement of the appeal, but with the misery of a system that ground so slowly particularly when it was concerned with the powerless. Lord Denning’s “appalling vista” statement that brought the 1975 appeal of the same case to an end kept ringing around in my head. As it did I steeled myself with positive thoughts, first, that there was something radically wrong with the justice system that feared evidence against it, and second, that one day these prisoners would walk free.

As I walked in the door of my residence wet and hungry, the phone rang. I picked it up thinking that it might be for someone else in the house. It was for me. Eve Ritchings, a journalist at Sky Television was on the line. She requested that I go back down to the Sky studios in Westminster, beside the Houses of Parliament, for an interview regarding the appeal, its postponement and the overwhelming disappointment of the families and all involved in the campaign for justice. She offered to send a taxi. I accepted, and replied that I would use public transport. Somehow there was a spring in my step as I made my way to Hampstead Tube Station. The fact that there was someone out there who was interested in the raw human emotion of the disappointment, despair and rejection of the families gave me something to hang on to. What I was going to say at the interview didn’t cross my mind. As I neared the television studios I tried to gather my thoughts but nothing was happening. My mind was blank. All my energy was focused on just getting there, finding the place and the person whose name Eve had given me to contact regarding the interview.

The person at the reception desk sent me down two floors or maybe more on the lift. There I was met by another person who took me to a vacant studio. On the wall was a monitor that relayed the news as it was broadcast. The attendant positioned a chair in front of a screen that had a London scene as a backdrop. He told me to concentrate on a camera high up on the wall and wait until called for the seven o'clock news. Not knowing what the questions were going to be from the interviewer I tried to keep a clear, objective and factual mind.

As I watched the seven o’clock news break my antennas sharpened. The first item on the news was the about a certain businessman, Asil Nadir, the head of a multinational company, being held in custody for the night in some London prison. His wife and some family members were interviewed regarding their husband, father and friend being held in prison for the night. They were distraught, disappointed and dismayed at the justice system charging him with alleged fraud and holding him in prison. Also, there were worried as to how he would cope with the nocturnal incarceration. I empathised with their distress as they faded out of the picture. But their worry about his incarceration gave me a pointer as to how I would manage the interview.

The interviewer then addressed me inquiring, first, as to how the men going back to prison felt, and second, how their families felt? The Nadir family in their response actually made my answers easy. I replied “if the Mr. Nadir is going to find prison difficult for one night spare a thought for those six innocent men who are going back to prison after having already spent seventeen years in prisons throughout Britain away from family and friends.” Equally, I empathised with Nadir’s family fears, anxieties and loss and emphasised the extremely difficult plight of the families of the men who were without their husbands and fathers for the past seventeen years. Imagine, I suggested to the interviewer, the heroism of those wives who for seventeen years dragged their children as often as they could afford to visit their fathers in prisons throughout Britain. They were poor. 

However, given all that about the people I was interested in, nevertheless it is important to recognise the trauma, fears and anxieties of those whose near and dear were going to be in prison for the first time.

Asil Nadir had many friends in high government places. He allegedly supported political parties and designer charities. In spite of many friends in the corridors of power he was later held in custody while awaiting trail from where he escaped in 1993. He sought refuge in Northern Cyprus from which he could not be extradited.

He returned to Britain to stand trial in 2010. He was allowed to live in luxury with his family in Mayfair for the past two years awaiting trial his legal team largely funded b the taxpayer through legal aid. Different treatment to that of the Birmingham Six who remained in prison until their appeal was upheld at the Old Bailey in March 1991. 

Today, twenty years later, Asil Nadir was found guilty of the theft of £30 million from his company Polly Peck. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. His wife read a statement outside the court in which she said her husband was a “man of great character, integrity and honour, who gave in abundance to charities and worthy organisations for many years.” (The Guardian, 24/8/12)

Where are his political friends now?

At a time when opportunism is everything’

when hope seems lost,

when everything boils down to a cynical business deal,

we must find the courage to dream.

To regain romance.

The romance of believing in justice, in freedom and in dignity.

For everybody.

(Arundhati Roy)