Justice?

This week, the UK Court of Appeal upheld the Labour government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action, rejecting comparisons with the suffragettes and describing Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, as a company engaged in a “lawful business.”

Yet the suffragettes were far from exclusively peaceful campaigners. Alongside civil disobedience, they smashed windows, planted bombs, set fire to buildings, and carried out acts of sabotage in pursuit of political change.

Palestine Action has targeted weapons factories and military equipment on the grounds that companies such as Elbit profit from and facilitate Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In response to this ruling, I wanted to create a photomontage as a symbolic and explicitly political piece of visual commentary. The work reflects a prevalent view that the British legal system is protecting arms manufacturers while suppressing anti-war protest.

I photographed the protester outside the Labour Party Conference shortly before her arrest in September 2025. There was a striking serenity about her that I hope the image captures. She is juxtaposed with a representation of the golden female figure that stands atop London’s Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court), commonly known as Lady Justice.

Traditionally, Lady Justice symbolises fairness, impartiality, and the rule of law. Here, however, she is depicted holding an IDF-issued gun to the protester’s head, deliberately inverting that symbolism. Rather than embodying justice, she becomes an instrument of coercion and intimidation.

The image expresses my belief that today’s legal system is increasingly being used against those who protest injustice. Justice itself appears compromised, subordinated to political and economic power. That is why the scales of justice emerge from the protester’s left arm: they no longer belong to the institution that claims to uphold them, but to those who resist.

It is, unapologetically, a piece of political art.