From The Guardian letters, Thursday 6 September:
UK guilty too
While welcoming the decision to release the South African miners who were charged with the murder of their colleagues (Report, 3 September), I despair that the outcry does not reach our own country, where people in England and Wales are being rounded up and charged under the same "common purpose" law, also called "joint enterprise". Are we so different from the South African apartheid regime when we can charge 21 schoolchildren with the murder of a boy in Victoria Station two years ago? Or give life sentences to children whose friends committed a crime they did not foresee or could prevent?
JENGbA, Joint Enterprise: Not Guilty by Association, is campaigning to highlight the injustice of this law and has called upon the director of public prosecutions to issue the guidelines for prosecutors he promised in January. We have also asked the government to call a moratorium until those guidelines have been issued.
Cath O'Hanlon
www.jointenterprise.co
We campaign on behalf of, and with, those wrongfully convicted. We're campaigning to reform legal abuse by Joint Enterprise.
