SHORTLY after midnight on 21 December the Czechoslovak Appeal Court announced unsurprising verdict. Al the end of a 16-hour session it rejected the appeals by six members of the Committee to Defend Unjustly Prosecuted against sentences iotalling 23 years for their activities in defence of civil rights.
Despite the regime's efforts to keep the whole thing secret, a number of lawyers and journalists from the Wcst were in Prague to observe the proceedings. Among them, on behalf of the London-based Charter Commitec, was Platts-Mills QC.
Platts-Mills is president left-wing lawyers' Haldane Society, vice-president Federation of Democratic Lawyers. In 1938 he was active in the campaign Britain's sell-out of Czechoslovakia, and in 1948 he was expelled from the Labour Party for speaking out in favour uf the Communist seizure of power.
All but accused were courtroom. Platts-Mills other lawvers who had a letter ot introduction person, Ms Dojcorova, were stopped in the foyer and told that she was busy (VONS)
but would try to see them at the end of the hearing Not satisfied with this, PlattsMills and an Austrian representative of Amnesty International then to see the Minister of Justice. But he was too busy It was anniversary, explained his secretary, • 77 and besider. the budding was being John repaired. But if they returned to the court they could Ondrej, president of the Czechosloyak Bar Council.
Due lo an Soviet- however, they. were met not by Mr Ondrej arrested them and took them to the stop Central Police HO Two hours later the police had obviously realised the implications of their four relatives highest refused entry to the misused and to the court's chairOn distance went This wedding The speak fact, unfortunate error, police, senior officer apologised to Plaits-Mills and assured him that he was a person character had been by unscrupulous people. With this he was released.
Minutes after leaving the police HQ, however, he was accosted by a man who asked him in fluent English if he wanted to change some money.
being rebuffed the • man then followed Platts-Mills ai a discreet Czechoslovak policemen may not.. bevery imaginative. But they make up for it in numbers. No less than 12 of them werc used later that afternoon to arrest Charter 77 spokesperson Zdena Tominova as she was speaking to Platts-Mills in a calé trial was characterised, in by the harassment of Czechoslovak citizens who tried to ensurc an open hearing, the closing of the court 1o all but a handful of and the arrest or toreten lawyers whose only wish wasto attend ostensibly open proceedings. Increasingly the Western labour movement is asking: what is it that the Prague authorities are trying to hid
hypocrisy bounds. While our endlessly about the foreign troops [in this case Russians] in a small country, thing is happening in a country for which they Zimbabwe.
Several thousand South troops have been operating there for some time. Now magazine reported in early December that 'there is a battery of South African Chirundu on Lambesi muzzles pointed at Zambia. There are armed South African guards on the railway line north of Beitbridge, least as far as Rutenga, and perhaps beyond.
"There are South African pilots at the controls hunting Patriotic Front guerillas deep in the Zimbabwe-Rhodesis There are patrols of South African soldiers fanning Hills, north of the Limpopo.
When the ceasefire was signed the British assured the Patriotic Front that the South withdrawn. But happened.
According to ZANU knows LUCK go on presence responsibility African howitzers their of Puma helicopters, the Mateke he dismissed as suggestion that South would be withdrawn.
Africans would be has they will de Simon, 'mest unlikely' the African units Although the South Africans say nothing to hinder the settlement process in Rodesia', wrote they are known still to be Army. They are supposed to confined to their bases under the ceasefire, but immediately Christmas they were authorised to patrol along the Mozambique and Botswana borders.
Within days they were murdering be after SOUTH African troops on patrol near the border
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- The foreign invasion the Tories are backing En