Angie Zelter

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Angie Zelter (b. 5 June 1951) is a political activist, who describes herself as a 'global citizen' and is the founder of a number of international campaign groups including Trident Ploughshares and the International Women's Peace Service.

She specialises in initiating non-violent direct action campaigns and has been arrested over 100 times in Belgium, Canada, England, Malaysia, Norway, Poland and Scotland, serving 16 prison sentences.

In the 1980s she founded the Snowball Campaign which encouraged several thousand people to cut the fences around US military bases in the UK. In 1996 she was part of a group that disarmed a Hawk Jet, ZH955, causing £1.5million damage and preventing it from being exported to Indonesia where it would have been used to attack East Timor.^[1] She was acquitted for this action in a victory which forced the issue of arms control onto the mainstream agenda.

[edit] Trident Ploughshares

Main article: Trident Ploughshares

Following the 8 July 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, which outlined 7 counts of international law under which the Trident missile system was illegal, Zelter helped form the Trident Ploughshares 2000 campaign which demanded the United Kingdom Government develop a plan to dismantle Trident. As no plan was forthcoming from the Government, Trident Ploughshares activists undertook various actions designed to hinder the operations in various sites across the United Kingdom connected with the deployment of Trident nuclear missiles.

In 1998, she was part of a group of women who boarded the Maytime, a research vessel used by the Faslane nuclear submarine base, in Loch Goil in Scotland, and damaged scientific equipment. She was acquitted at a subsequent trial, after claiming that the use or preparation of the Trident nuclear weapons system was a war crime, and that the protesters were authorized by international law to prevent this war crime from happening.^[2] After an appeal to the Scottish High Court with the Lord Advocate's Reference 2001^[3] it was ruled that the defence should not have been admissible. Under Scottish Law, the High Court did not have the ability to overturn the acquittals.

Angie is author of "Trident on Trial: the case for people's disarmament" (Luath Press, 2001).