Reykjavík District Court, April 3: Anti-Deportation Protesters got 2 Years on Probation for ‘Nuisance’

As far as we can tell, the verdict which fell this afternoon, April 3 2019, in the District Attorney’s case against Jórunn Edda Helgadóttir and Ragnheiður Freyja Kristínardóttir, is the severest verdict in any trial over anti-deportation protesters for acts of solidarity, throughout Europe, in recent years.

The case: Jórunn and Ragnheiður stood up inside a still-standing passenger plane at Keflavík Airport. They explained to passengers that a man was being unjustly deported on that flight, that his life was thereby threatened, and that they would refuse to sit until he had been safely escorted out of the airplane. This was in May 2016. The protesters were unarmed. No one was injured, except the protesters themselves, during their subsequent arrests. Any delay caused to the flight schedule should be considered inconsequential, according to the verdict. 30 minutes, tops.

The protesters did, however, according to the Court, cause ‘severe nuisance’.

Today, for their act of nuisance during a deportation, the two were sentenced to two years on probation.

For a similar act of protest in 2018, Sweden’s Elin Ersson was fined, but received no prison sentence. In Britain’s recent case of the Stansted 15, Judge Christopher Morgan reasoned: „In normal circumstances only a custodial sentence would have been justified in this case, but I accept that your intentions were to demonstrate“. Hence no prison sentence.

In order to dismiss human rights, freedom of speech and other imported trivialities, however, at Reykjavík’s District Court this afternoon, Judge Barbara Björnsdóttir simply stated:

„Freedom of expression and assembly have certain limitations and cannot justify the defendants’ actions“.

This vague notion of ‘certain limitations’ was the Court’s whole reasoning to dismiss the relevance of human and civil rights in this case.

And that was that. The court sentenced Jórunn and Ragnheiður to three months in prison, to be served on probation for two years, and to bear the cost of court proceedings, a charge amounting to over €8,000 each.