Daniel Viesnik writes: On Monday 1 February, at Highbury Corner magistrates’ court in north London, I was sentenced to 14 days’ imprisonment (of which I served just four) for wilfully refusing to pay a £50 fine and £465 court costs for a symbolic sit-down protest at the gates of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire in July 2007. It was my first time in prison.
The peaceful protest took place during the three-month Footprints for Peace walk towards a nuclear-free future from Dublin to London (via Belfast and Glasgow). It was the first time I had faced arrest, and I thought long and hard about it as we walked down from the Faslane submarine base in Scotland.
As I lay on the top bunk of my bed, locked up in a little white cell in HMP Pentonville’s “A” wing for 22 hours a day with just my Lithuanian cellmate and daytime TV for company, I had occasion to reflect upon the decision I made, probably somewhere around Sellafield in Cumbria, that if I got arrested trying to stop new nuclear warheads being built at Aldermaston, it would somehow not seem appropriate to accept a caution or pay a fine.
If I had done wrong, then surely it was of the kind that Oskar Schindler was guilty of when he helped Jews avoid the gas chambers, or that Rosa Parks had committed when she impudently refused to move from the “white” section of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
My days of incarceration passed slowly enough that I had time to re-read the short statement I had made to court earlier in the week.
It ended with a quote from Henry David Thoreau from his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” which seemed to fit the occasion: “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” www.tinyurl.com/peacenews208
Topics: Nuclear weapons