Three protesters who were arrested last July during the Lebanon war will finally face trial on April 23rd 2007 before Brighton Magistrates Court. They are each charged with one offence of Aggravated Trespass during a blockade of EDO MBM Technology Ltd.

The three stated to media at the time that EDO MBM, in Home Farm Road, Brighton, supply the Israeli Air Force with bomb release technology, including the EDO MBM Zero Retention Force Arming Unit, (an essential part of the VER-2, which is the main bomb rack used by the Israeli F16 fighter jet), which is actively manufactured in Brighton according to the company’s own website.


One week after the protest Israel used the F16 to attack Qana in Lebanon, in a bombing that killed 28 people, mostly women and children. Fragments of the bomb found at the scene identified it as an MK-84, the largest conventional weapon in the Israeli F16 arsenal.

EDO MBM is the UK subsidiary of US arms firm EDO Corporation, which is based in New York City. The Crown Prosecution Service will have to demonstrate to the court that EDO's business is lawful in order to make the charges of aggravated trespass stick, because it is a defence to disrupt a business that is engaged in unlawful activity. Apart from on one occasion when protesters pleaded guilty to a charge of obstruction of the highway, all subsequent criminal proceedings brought against protesters who have been arrested at the arms factory (on various public order grounds) have failed to produce convictions, or those convictions were overturned on appeal.

A vital limb of these legal defences has been that EDO MBM are complicit in war crimes under UK law, and time and again EDO's directors have faced cross examination on their supply of military equipment to various warmongering regimes. The latest trial will present the most comprehensive evidence so far of EDO MBM's involvement in the supply of equipment to the Israel military, which the company have officially denied since 2004. Meanwhile their US parent firm EDO Corporation has disclosed that they have direct contracts with the Israeli Ministry of Defence, supplying sonar, bomb release, and arming units to the regime.

In 2005-6 EDO tried and failed to gain a high court harassment injunction against protesters that would have criminalised the campaign against the company in Brighton. The case cost the company millions in legal costs and related expenses. Evidence of EDO's war crimes involvement was then collated into a defence document described by a high court judge as 'admirable' in its detail. However the evidence was never tested in a trial because EDO dropped its claim for an injunction after 11 months, after another judge blamed them, and their lawyer Tim Lawson-Cruttenden for 'flagrant disregard' of the court process in its handling of the case.

2006 was a financial disaster for the company which was also implicated in a high level Pentagon-corporate corruption scandal related to the multi-billion dollar F22A programme, involving retired CIA military director Admiral Dennis C. Blair who was forced to resign from EDO’s board, and as the director and CEO of publicly funded think-tank IDA. However close links to the Bush administration and influential US politicians have secured future contracts that have kept it afloat. EDO have also invested heavily in acquisitions of tech companies supplying the expanding US security and intelligence agencies.

This time around an expert witness for the protester's defence is Professor Nick Grief, the Steele Raymond LLP Professor of Law at Bournemouth University, who is an expert in international law and also a practising barrister with Doughty Street Chambers. He will outline in a specially commissioned report for the case how the protesters defence argument has considerable force under international and domestic law.

The case is listed for 3 days beginning on Monday 23rd April 2007. Supporters are welcome.