COURT OF APPEAL JUDGEMENT

Three Lord Justices delivered their judgement on 4th May. The news was dissappointing but not unexpected. They have refused our appeal to have a judicial review. However, their only reason for doing so is that they believe that they do not have the jurisdiction to overturn what they describe as 'clear and consistant line of jurisprudence in Strasbourg'. That is to say, because the European Commission turned away three similar cases 20 years ago, we must take our argument that their reasoning is wrong back to them. All three concur that 'They (European Commission) have taken what may be thought to be a rather strict or narrow line on the manifestation of religious and philosophical belief ... In some respects the reasoning may be legally and logically unsound'.

This makes in number, five High Court and Court of Appeal judges who think we may have an arguable case as far as part 1 of Article 9 is concerned ie. objecting to paying for the military through our taxes is a manifestation of our religious and philosophical beliefs. The fact that such emminent British judges think this, must surely persuade the Strasbourg authorities to hear our case.

All five, however, lay doubt on our likelihood of success in part 2 of Article 9 - that the Treasury has good reason to refuse to accommodate our consciences. They give all sorts of reasons why it would not be possible to set up a peace fund, which look like strong answers, but in fact they do not stand up to scrutiny. These were looked at in our appeal, but the Treasury failed to come up with evidence that we asked for. So it was only a review of evidence without substantial debate on the Treasury's objections. Shortly we hope to publish the skeleton arguments put forward by them as submitted to the Court of Appeal, side by side with our counterarguments.

We also expect in the very near future to launch our new campaign for Europe. This will be a significant step up in the campaign as we expect to involve the other peace tax groups in other member states of the Council of Europe. Watch this space.

*Our delay in reporting this decision is that our lawyers needed to request an appeal to the House of Lords in order to exhaust all remedies in the British courts. This appeal was denied which is a relief because we would only have been told the same thing at great expense and trouble. We do now need to take this case to the European Court of Human Rights. In fact bringing this issue to the whole of Europe is potentially of far greater value than merely bringing the case in Britain.

A deputation from PT7 attended the 11th International Conference on Peace Tax and War Tax Resistance in Berlin at the end of last month. We made many good contacts with campaigners and resisters from 15 different countries including the USA and Canada. Among them were two war tax resisters who’s cases are currently under way. Dan Jenkins from New York is currently building a brilliant and comprehensive defence against an IRS legal action and has exchanged some useful information with us already. Jan Hellebaut who is alone in withholding taxes in Belgium and has had a long and gruelling journey through the courts. He is supported by his movement VRAK Aktie Vredesbelasting. We hope to maintain close links with all those we met.

We ran a busy workshop on the Friday afternoon, discussing the legal process and thinking of ways the other countries could join in. All saw our case as an opportunity to promote the peace tax cause around Europe. The possibility of PT7 affinity groups in each of the countries was suggested. As already mentioned we are currently making our DVD multilingual and our European friends will be helping us to distribute it around Europe.

Derek Brett of Conscience and Peace Tax International presented his newly published study - Military Recruitment and Conscientious Objection: A Thematic Global Survey. He made a very useful point which PT7 can use. Article 18 of the International Declaration of Human Rights, which is repeated verbatim in Article 9 of ECHR, says a state cannot drop the right of conscientious objection just because there is a war looming. One of the Treasury's arguments is that our right not to pay for military would threaten national security. Derek agreed that they cannot make this argument in order to remove our human right. CPTI are offering to provide an amicus brief for our case. Their contribution would be good because they are an officially recognised NGO of the UN.

CPTI held their AGM on the Saturday at which Robin Brookes was elected onto the board. They and we see the usefulness of having a PT7 member in the committee at this time in our campaign.

Also decided at the AGM was that Conscience in Britain will host the next conference in 2008. Again all agree that with PT7's case looming this would be most apt. The exact dates and venue has yet to be decided by Conscience, we will let you know when.

Some other useful snippets:
- The Final Statement of the conference is reproduced below.
- there are 8 - 10,000 war tax resisters in the USA and about 8,000 in Spain.
- A Dutch peace organisation, Euro’s vor Vrede, have been working on three computer games to interest younger people in peace tax issues. These might be adapted to go on the PeacePays website.
- We sold 5 ‘Taxman’ t-shirts to delegates.