[3] The intended injunction, brought under Section 3 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, applied to all protesters, not only those named in the court papers (who in any case denied the allegations).
The barrister David Perry was instructed by the UK Attorney-General to defend the legality of the war on Iraq, and apparently support EDO's case for the injunction.
Later in a Freedom of Information response in 2006 the Attorney General's Office admitted that Perry had simply taken the word of the company on this issue and assumed it to be true even though he had not verified it.
[5] Despite this intervention, the court did not accept the AG's argument that taking into account an honestly held belief by protesters that war crimes had taken place assisted by EDO, was wrong.
The court found that if there was an imminent war crime that the protesters believed on reasonable grounds, was about to take place, in which EDO were complicit, then preventative direct action could lawfully be taken against the company without waiting for the authorities of the state to intervene.
In response to this the judge went so far as to compare the director of EDO to Bruno Tesch (Chemist) of the Zyclon B case, who was executed for assisting the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1940s.
The represented defendants had no choice but to sign the undertaking because Legal Aid had become dependent on the offer of such a document to EDO, as a result of the intervention of Keir Starmer QC supposedly on the behalf of the defence.
[6] As a result of the collapse of the year-long court battle, EDO suffered legal costs of between £1-£1.5 million; more than an entire year's profit for the Brighton arms company.
[7] In 2011 it was revealed that an undercover police officer from the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) using the covername 'Marco Jacobs'[8] had spied on meetings of the defendants during the injunction case in 2005/6.