It was the morning of the 8th of September 2025, and some hours before that, Zo Hailu, a British citizen based in Berlin, had been holding hands in a circle of four other comrades. They were in Ulm, a city in Baden-Württemberg, inside an Elbit Systems Deutschland office. One, Crow Tricks, another British citizen, re-stated aloud to their comrades as police entered the room, “remember everyone, we are non-violent”. Alongside Zo and Crow in the circle were Daniel Tatlow-Devally, Leandra Rollo, and Vi Kovarbasic, of Ireland, Spain, and Germany, respectively. Each would be moved after their arrests to various prisons across South and West Germany.
They are accused of trespassing, property damage of up to €1 million, and, crucially, of forming or belonging to a criminal organisation, per Section 129 of the German Criminal Code. At the time of writing, the five have all been in pre-trial detention for over 11 months. Some of the five are in effective solitary confinement for 20 to 23 hours of the day.
“I was aware it could get quite ugly”, Daniel Tatlow-Devally stated in an interview with der Freitag, speaking of how they had expected the state to respond, “but I did not expect this”.
Many aspects of their imprisonment and treatment in court suggest pre-judgement. In a pre-trial appeal against the denial of bail, the state’s Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht), in addition to rejecting the appeal, commented on the nature of the action and speculated that the five were likely to receive sentences close to the five-year maximum of a charge of Section 129. In court, the five are kept during proceedings behind bulletproof glass, separated from their lawyers. The setup relies upon an intercom system, which the five’s defence lawyers have objected to on the grounds of European-level law guaranteeing unrestricted and confidential communication between defence and defendant. They are transported to court from the five (intentionally different) prisons where they are held, and while in the cage at the back of the prisoner transport vans, they are kept in shackles on their feet and in weighty handcuffs.
Zo Hailu was stripped naked when they first arrived at the prison in Bühl. They were left then, after being handed a diaper to wear, in a cell without other clothing – not even a bra – for six hours. Addressing the court on July 22nd in support of a motion by fellow defendant Vi Kovarbasic to have the security measures reviewed for proportionality, Zo stated, “I have worked as a cleaner in my prison for seven or eight months. I walk around the prison completely unsupervised every day[…]. There is nothing after 10 months of my behaviour to indicate that we might flee. So why are we being chained even by the feet?”
As for their imprisonment, special powers enabled by Section 129 allow the five to be treated as informational hazards. Family visits are attended by police, who interrupt conversations to enforce a ban on talking about anything related to their action. This includes what might be deemed as motivation, and thus, discussion on the genocide in Gaza is also not permitted.
In Ulm prison, Tatlow-Devally was denied the right to access their lawyer for two weeks after their incarceration. Visits, either from Daniel’s family or from the Irish consulate, were also disallowed for their first month in prison. The prison did not inform Daniel that their family had been, in the words of Mimi Tatlow-Golden, Daniel’s mother, “frantically trying to contact them”.
The court, Judge Lauchstädt, and her chamber
Germany’s legal system has notable and considerable differences from Britain’s. While the British state is launching an assault on the jury system, and while Mr Justice Johnson makes intentional efforts to circumvent the jury’s agency in the Filton trial, via having omitted the information of the accusation of terrorism, Germany’s starting point, being a civil law system, is one without a full jury. The chamber comprises the presiding judge, in this case Judge Katrin Lauchstädt; two assisting judges; and two lay-judges – civilians untrained in law. While the latter, the lay-judges, are supposed to serve the same role as a jury – mitigating the presiding judge’s power – they, in practice, tend to only support what their more authoritative, trained, and experienced co-judges tell them is correct.
Section 129a of the German Criminal Code relates to groups deemed to be national terrorists, and Section 129b punishes members of what Germany defines as international terrorist groups. With Germany’s definition of “terrorism” being somewhat stricter than Britain’s, the Ulm5 are being tried as a criminal organisation, under Section 129 proper. Criminal organisation legislation, however, is still a hefty cudgel of the state against activists and left-wing movements. Activists of the climate activist group Letzte Generation and others of Antifa East have already been charged with Section 129 – nothing unfamiliar to those in Britain. In a manner reminiscent of Britain, Germany uses security laws to lash out with the full heft of the security state in the prosecution of activists – a mark of states too nervous to allow fundamental rights.
The “rule of law”
The Genocide Convention obliges signatories to prevent genocide, and the International Court of Justice “Bosnia v Serbia” judgement clarified that “states are obliged to take to employ all means reasonably available to them, so as to prevent genocide so far as possible” (paragraph 430). So, when a state fails to act, or indeed when a state aids and abets genocide, are individuals not obliged to act? Then, the persecution of activists who followed the logic of international law, employing all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide so far as possible, is a twisted way of taking Germany’s own, and Britain’s own, post-war commitments to court.
Judge Lauchstädt and her chamber, by refusing to engage with the culpability of Elbit Systems Deutschland, dodge what might be a question for strict adherents to the notion of the rule of law: whether the means of opposing genocide employed by Zo, Crow, Daniel, Leandra, and Vi are legitimate. (If such a question were brought up by the court, the answer in any case could not be in doubt and needs no explanation here). Not factoring in Elbit Systems Deutschland’s role in genocide is equivalent to the court having already ruled that any resistance to genocide is illegitimate. In other words, by its silence, the court might as well be announcing that the firm’s role need not be considered, as regardless of whether or not it is a party to genocide, taking direct action against the firm is either way punishable.
Reading into this silence and the chamber’s conduct as such is not all too much of a stretch. On July 1st, Bastian Gropp of the Baden-Württemberg policing office took to the stand. He clarified that the police had not investigated Elbit Systems Deutschland’s role. While such a lack of investigation is perhaps unsurprising, the police could have been prompted to do so by the state’s public prosecutor. As pointed out in court by the defence, prosecutors in Germany have unique obligations: to investigate in full both incriminating and exonerating evidence.
During questioning as to whether or not Bastian Gropp was aware of the prosecutor’s obligations, the senior public prosecutor at the trial, Ronny Stengel, interjected: that it was “clear from the outset” that there were no grounds for justification of this case. Therefore, any investigation into Elbit Systems Deutschland would be legally irrelevant.
The role of direct action
In various statements in court, the Ulm5 have emphasised that each individual’s attempts, and the movement’s attempts more broadly, to effect change – taking to the streets – have changed little. Demonstrations have a key role in creating networks, and raising among individuals the motivation and capacity to take action within their own capacity. Yet, in terms of demonstrations themselves having a direct effect, it might even be the case in Germany that demonstrations have done less than nothing: in Berlin, where each of the Ulm5 had been living before the night of their action, police regularly brutalise demonstrators, leading in some cases to life-long injuries of precisely the people motivated to stand up against genocide. While polls suggest the German public is increasingly against arms exports to Israel, the country’s current “grand-coalition” government, of Germany’s two most historically powerful political parties, has set its ongoing policy of so-called Staatsräson as immovable. As for the chance of replacing this government, the grand coalition is only threatened by the ultra-right AfD, polling at 28% at the time of writing.
As for action beyond demonstrating, the parade of punishment on display in the Ulm5 trial, with the extensive pre-trial detention, the presenting of the Ulm5 to press in handcuffs, and the historically unique site of the trial (the trial takes place in the courtroom attached Stammheim prison, where in the 1970s West Germany’s “left-wing terrorism” group Red Army Faction were famously tried: a point not lost on the German public), the state attempts to remind the public what might happen if they take opposing genocide into their own hands.
Yet, in the context of genocide, the threat of consequences for those who take action further deepens Germany’s and Britain’s distancing from any semblance of defence of human rights – with the notion of being such “defenders” being crucial to both countries’ post-Cold War identities.
What the Ulm5 have done, and the Filton 25 for their part, therefore, is remind us all of our responsibility to act. Germany’s commitment to genocide being all the more rigid reminds any onlooker of Germany’s history of destroying any semblance of justice while acting under the guise of law: albeit back then, Germany was using twisted forms of law for carrying out, rather than now aiding, genocide. Germany staves off, for as long as it possibly can, grounds for the average citizen to ask themselves the fundamental question of “what would you do?” via tactics of obfuscation or misdirection: hiding the police’s brutalising of protesters; feigning to stop arms deliveries only to start sending them again; and so on.
A moral – and legal – obligation
“Never” has become “again” – and now the Germans and British are working together. The Gaza genocide has necessitated action. The strangling of avenues towards taking action, as is on display with the Ulm5 and the Filton 25 and their treatment, should make it plain that we are back in that place in time called “history”: i.e., the moments where the systems in which we live fail to follow even their own rules. Even if basic moral demands are factored out, the demands of the Genocide Convention scream at us through the news of those acting in accordance with the Convention being tried as terrorists and criminal organisations.
What to do is in the eye of the beholder, but in this writer’s opinion, the necessity of organising, and of bringing together the crucial resource, and thus tool, of the public – labour, and the need for the utter rejection of illegitimate power is all the more clear.
