 15 anti-deportation activists who were prosecuted under anti-terror legislation have today had their convictions overturned. The StansDead 15 blocked a charter deportation flight taking off in March 2017 by breaking into the airfield and locking themselves to an aeroplane. Now they were charged with and found guilty of endangering the safety of an aerodrome. It was the first time the legislation had been used to prosecute peaceful protesters since the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act was introduced in response to the Lockerbie bombing. However, today an appeal judge found and I quote, the closure of the runway was undoubtedly disruptive and expensive, but there was no evidence that it resulted in likely endangerment to the safety of the aerodrome or of persons there. So the judge has said this should never have been prosecuted as an act of terrorism, because even though it was against the law, it wasn't against that law, right? I'm now delighted to be joined by one of the StansDead protesters, Ben Smoke. Ben, congratulations on the result today. You must be very pleased. Thanks so much, Naomi. Yeah, I am ecstatic, very, very relieved, very happy to be sat here wearing my ex-terrorist jumper with pride. Yeah, it's been a very, very long and arduous and harrowing for years that I don't think anybody in their right mind would have seen coming. I think the use, as you were kind of explaining, the use of terror legislation is unprecedented in the use of this one particularly, particularly against peaceful protesters. I mean, the idea, I was talking to somebody earlier, was the idea that we were endangering safety and we were sat there and surrounded by police who were all being very, as they want to be, very chatty and laughing and happy and they didn't look like people that were fearing for their own safety. I was locked on singing Beyonce and Abba, which I guess is probably the only act of terrorism that happened on that evening. And so I think, yeah, kind of feeling incredibly, incredibly happy and incredibly vindicated this evening. This is a legal question that I don't know the answer to. I hope you do. Which is that now you've been cleared of this stupid terrorism charge. Have you just committed no crime at all? Or have you committed a lesser crime of something like aggravated trespass? So as it stands, right this second, I have no criminal record whatsoever, which I'm not surprised about as anyone else. But I think, yeah, so to kind of like lay it out is obviously in terms of aggravated trespass, that was what we were originally charged with and that's what we were originally set to go to trial for. And then as the action happened in March 2017, we received an email sometime around June 2017 from our lawyers saying that the CPS were planning on upping it to this terror charge. And at the time, I was like, that's clearly ludicrous. This is never going to happen. And then three weeks later, it happened. And then obviously, we all kind of know how that story ended. But with the aggravated trespass charge, it never got taken away. So it's still there on the docket, which means that it's still live to a certain extent. And that's kind of one of the things that obviously we want. It means that we are at risk, as far as I'm aware, and I'm very much not a lawyer, but as far as I'm aware, we are at risk of prosecution deciding to plow forward because they have been very, very embarrassed by today. Fundamentally, that would be wrong, obviously, on so many levels, not least the fact that they have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds attempting to punish us for a crime that, as the court of appeal has said, we simply didn't do. But legally, we are still kind of, I think, Japanese, not the word, but I think I've been very much sort of spending today thinking about it being the end of the day, end of the road, and unfortunately with these things, it very much isn't. But that's not to say that today is an incredible moment and a huge relief and something that I personally take a huge amount of pride in and a huge amount of pride in all of the people that have kind of like been along and helped us along the way. The significance of the stanza 15 winning this case cannot be overstated. And what it would have meant for our civil liberties in the way that you outline, if that appeal had not been successful. This expansion of the remit of anti-terror legislation is something that has been happening for a very long time and had the stanza 15 lost this appeal. And that would have represented a very, very significant victory for, to use a kind of like super theory term, like the castle or state, it would have represented a really big victory in that. And that's something that affects all of us. And what we've seen here in sort of following, whether it's through our friends, people like Ben, and sort of following this on Navarra is we've sort of seen in real time that the human cost of defending ourselves from these encroaching attacks on civil liberties under the guise of the war on terror. For a lot of us, this has just been like a headline. But you know, for those who have gone through it, you know, that's come at a huge personal cost. Like I can't imagine what what that's been like to go through for several years. And this is another thing that the kind of courts do to sort of demoralize you as they drag you through the courts like years and years, you don't really know, you know, where you're going to be in the next couple of years. And I guess, you know, that's why we call it we call it struggle. And so I think we all owe people like Ben and, you know, the whole legal team and all of the people that were involved in winning that appeal, we all owe them a huge amount for that fight, because this victory is very important to all of us.