Met refers journalist Medhurst to Crown Prosecution Service, bail extended to November

More dragged-out bail as Starmer regime seeks to ‘make the process the punishment’ against anti-genocide journalists and activists

The Starmer regime’s assault on journalists and activists who expose and oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues. Richard Medhurst, the Syrian-born British journalist and son of Nobel Peace Prize winners, who was arrested by police last August as part of the regime’s misuse of anti-terror laws to target anti-genocide journalists and activists and has been kept in limbo for nine months since as the police state continues to ‘make the process the punishment’, has been told that the Metropolitan Police has referred his case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for a decision on whether he will be prosecuted under the Terrorism Act and that he remains on bail until at least November.

Medhurst had previously been told to surrender himself to Heathrow police on 15 May, but the imposition of yet another lengthy extension is consistent with the state’s now-habitual practice of keeping anti-genocide journalists and campaigners in limbo for lengthy periods in what seems clearly to represent the authorities ‘making the process the punishment’ to ensure some deterrent effect even if its victims are ultimately acquitted.

The same tactic has been used on other journalists and authors, many of them Jewish. At least two have been charged, again with lengthy periods on bail, as the government misuses the Terrorism Act – Natalie Strecker and Tony Greenstein. Eighteen anti-genocide campaigners are even being held in prison for well over a year before their case comes to trial, after the CPS used anti-terror legislation to persuade a judge to deny bail despite the fact that they have not been charged under anti-terror laws.

The CPS, which has repeatedly destroyed records to hide Starmer’s involvement in bad decisions during his tenure as Director of Prosecutions, has now been exposed consulting with the Israeli embassy about their case.

The regime’s potential charges against Medhurst – who is also being persecuted in Austria – under the Terrorism Act carry a potential fourteen-year sentence, or two years for protecting the confidentiality of journalistic sources by refusing to disclose his device passwords to police. He spoke to journalist Chris Hedges this week about his situation and the Starmer regime’s police-state war on journalism, freedom of speech and democracy:

Starmer’s ‘lawfare’ war, misusing the Terrorism Act as a weapon against honest reporting and free speech on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than two hundred thousand people so far and now involves mass bombing and a starvation blockade on around two million surviving Palestinians, has accompanied the UK military’s direct assistance to Israeli forces engaged in the slaughter and siege of innocent civilians.

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