Barbara Dowling's census case
Wed 7 Aug 2012
At the Court of Appeal in Edinburgh today the Crown dropped its proescution of Barbara Dowling for allegedly failing to fully complete her census form in 2011.
Barbara's legal team had gone to the appeal court to challenge an earlier decision by Glasgow Sheriff Court to allow the case against Barbara to proceed without allowing her lawyer to comment on an ammendment to the charge ( they were using out of date legislation ). The appeal court judges took the view that if the Crown were to contest the submission from Babara's lawyers, a further evidential hearing would be needed. The Crown then announced that it would drop the case.
The conduct by the Crown that led to the appeal was just the last in a long series of legal abuses designed to scapegoat a handful of people, without making any serious attempt to prosecute all the 187,924 Scottish households that the Register Office believes had failed to send in a census form as required.
Ethical Census and Scotland Against Criminalising Communities encouraged people to withhold co-operation from Scotland's 2011 census in protest at the involvement in key census work of a British subsidiary of CACI - a US-based defence contractor that was complicit in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
More background at http://www.ethicalcensus.org.uk/
No Complicity in Torture!
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