The Association of Prisoners

A while ago, Bristol ABC was one of a number of groups contacted by Ben Gunn, a prisoner at HMP Shepton Mallet, and nominated general secretary of the executive committee of the soon to be (re)launched Association of Prisoners, essentially a union for prisoners. We reproduce here the aims of the AoP, and calls for support. If you are in touch with any prisoners please pass this info on. This pdf may be a useful format for printing/circulating infoAssoc of Prisoners_aims See also this blog The Prisoners Voice for other background info.

The text is as written by Ben Gunn, although we have changed the order for ease of understanding ie putting the AoP Aims at top, and added in some links to help (and images are by us too).

Interview with the Campaign Against Prison Slavery

Recently Joe Black of CAPS, one of the most knowledgeable anarchists involved in prisoner solidarity work, was interviewed for the lefty rag Solidarity (organ of trot group Workers Liberty). Its a wide ranging interview covering diverse prison and prisoner-resistance related topics, and well worth a read, so we’ve cut and pasted into our blog below. You can read the original online version here if you think you can handle exposure to WL! We also recommend a visit to the CAPS website where there is plenty of info, facts and politics.

Free Renata Zelazna Letter Appeal

Campaign to support Renata
(Renata is a young Polish student and anarchist who has spent some time in the south of the UK involved in various campaigns and projects. After moving to Holland to pursue her interests, she ran into some serious shit. The following info has been circulated by some of her friends and supporters. There is plenty of background info to read here and here, and our previous report here).

Image circulated by Renata's friends

Renata Zelazna (aka Zebra) is a friend of ours, and a vegan and anarchist who is now on remand over an unfortunate chain of events. She was arrested in April 2010 in Holland where she had moved to study, after an altercation with construction site workers which ended up with police threatening her in her own flat. She was holding a knife that she was chopping vegetables with – leading to charges of attempted murder!

Campaign to Free Jock Palfreeman

Jock’s appeal now being prepared, but it may not be heard for 6 months!

Latest news: in late May the senior judge in Jock’s case finally provided his written report on the reasons for the guilty verdict last December. It’s in Bulgarian of course! Jock’s defence team can now apply for an appeal hearing, which may take 6 months to be heard. In the meantime Jock has been stuck in isolation since 19 February and remains locked in a small room 23 hours per day, although ironically prison overcrowding means he shares with another prisoner. He can receive mail (letters only, no books etc), and visitors if you happen to be in the area. See our previous reports on Jock here.

Support Jock
(supporters of Jock have released the following statement and info, please do what you can)

Jock Palfreeman is a 23 year old Australian who had the courage to stand up against 16 Nazis on a night out in Sofia, Bulgaria. He witnessed the fascists chasing and attacking two young Roma boys. Jock ran to the boys’ aid, he did his best to keep the Nazis at bay by waving a knife at them but they attacked him. Jock was left with nowhere to run and had no choice but to defend himself. Andrey Monov, one of the Nazis, was stabbed and killed and another, Antoan Zahariev was injured. The Roma boys ran away.

Polish anarchist arrested in Holland

Renata Zelazna is a Polish anarchist and vegan that has been studying and living in Holland. She is also spent some time living in Brighton, UK.

Recently while she was staying in Holland, she was violently arrested by the Dutch police after a claim that she had thrown a stone at a machine on a building site. But during her arrest, it is claimed that there was some trouble, and the police are now trying to charge her with attempted murder of the policeman who tried to arrest her. More info can be found here.

Judiciary backs the State and finds Smellie not guilty

The judge gave her verdict on Wednesday at Westminster magistrates court, in the non-jury trial of Sgt Smellie, the Met police TSG riot cop accused of assaulting a woman at last years G20 protests. Smellie had backhanded, and then hit twice on the leg with his metal baton, Nicola Fisher, the woman concerned. The question revolved around whether or not his baton strikes were excessive, as his backhander was deemed appropriate even by the prosecutor.

District Judge Daphne Wickham found no evidence had been provided to show use of the baton was not measured or correct. She said: “It was for the prosecution to prove this defendant was not acting in lawful self-defence. The prosecution has failed in this respect and the defendant has raised the issue of lawful self-defence and as such is entitled to be acquitted.” The judge said Sgt Smellie had a “mere seven seconds” to act when Ms Fisher ran in front of him hurling abuse at a vigil held on 2 April to mark the death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson at a previous demonstration. (from BBC report).

Smellie in court, but G20 Bristolian found not guilty

Sgt Smellie, a riot cop in the Met’s Territorial Support Group (TSG – fully trained riot thugs), has been up in Westminster Magistrates Court all week so far on a charge relating to the anti-G20/police brutality protests on 1 and 2 April last year in central London around the financial district. Smellie is charged with ‘common assault by beating’, which relates to his violent assault on a woman on 2 April when protesters gathered in response to the death of Ian Tomlinson the day before.

Training for Cop watching

Many abuses of police powers occur because we let them. Legal observation and police monitoring are effective tools in tackling such abuses and can make a real difference from collating the data necessary for effective legal challenges to providing and collecting witness statements for those arrested. These actions have both challenged the way protest and the streets are policed and kept innocent people out of prison.

Active Solidarity freesheet, Jock Palfreeman, and letter writing night

Our friends at the long running Brighton ABC group have just released the latest issue of their Active Solidarity freesheet. You can download it as a pdf here Active Solidarity_Mar10 and do pass it on.

One of the political prisoners they feature is Jock Palfreeman, whose case we featured back in December here. Jock is serving 20 years in a Bulgarian prison after defending himself against a large gang of nazis, one of whom he killed in self-defence, and wounded another. He has 2 chances of appeal to different levels of courts before his sentence is finalised. A letter just received from him in Bristol, and sent in mid-February, finds him in fine form, although when refering to the appeals he believes they are a bit of a foregone conclusion, not least because some judges were at the funeral of the nazi he killed. However since he sent that letter, matters have taken a turn for the worse for him, as revealed on his campaign website FreeJock – on 19 February he was placed in complete isolation (solitary confinement), the first prisoner to be so treated. In fact he could be there for upto 2 years whilst the appeals procedure is exhausted, which is an outrageous injustice designed to intimidate prisoners from appealing miscarriages of justice. Please check the links on FreeJock here and here and get sending letters of protest on his behalf.

Ongoing discrimination against indigenous peoples in Canada

Yesterday 17 February saw a small low key protest in Bristol, organised in solidarity with the anti-olympic protests in and around Vancouver in the Canadian state of British Columbia. The protest was called after Bristol ABC hosted a cafe and info night at Kebele social centre on Sunday 14 February, which focused on the attacks on the rights of indigenous (native) peoples in Canada, and the ongoing theft of their lands – which has been going on for over 500 years.

The promotion and organisation of the winter olympics in Vancouver has stimulated growing resistance from a broad coalition of communities and campaign groups, that has received an increasingly sympathetic hearing amongst the wider population as the massive costs of the olympics has become clearer, and the information known about the environmental impact has become more detailed – for example in excess of 100,000 trees have now been felled to accommodate the olympics. The Canadian government faces growing anger in relation to the olympics, and the economic mess Canada is currently in. No surprise then that at the end of December 2009, the Candian PM suspended Parliament until early March 2010, in a move that also put an embarassing inquiry into Canada’s complicity with the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan onto the backburner. The olympics and democracy? Yeah right!