Climate defender Rosa Hicks (29), alleged to have conspired on a Just Stop Oil Heathrow protest, was released on bail after being on remand for 6 months, due to broken heating in the women’s court cells. She is carrying five bags of prison mail on a trolley. (Friday 24 January, 2025)
This is no comment on if the writer or the Partisan editorial board agrees with Just Stop Oil’s politics or strategy – that is not the point, and there is no proof that Rosa agrees with JSO. The RCO is committed to ecological communism.
Rosa Hicks is an anarchist climate activist and care-worker who lived in WA for a few years. She moved back to the UK in 2023 and was arrested in July 2024 for an unproven allegation that she conspired on a non-violent Just Stop Oil protest at Heathrow Airport, making her part of the ‘Heathrow 10’. Rosa denies all allegations and is pleading not-guilty. During her time in Australia, Rosa was good at tackling patriarchal, celebrity-culture and anti-worker biases in the Australian climate movement, and was a solid rank-and-file comrade. She flew east once or twice but was not a ‘fly-in, fly-out’ activist. I remember her practical Doc Marten sandals, an improvement on the boots that ‘sand goths’ in WA used to defy reality with.
Rosa was granted indefinite bail due to the court cells for women at Isleworth Crown Court being too cold. She was held in prison on remand for 6 months and was released due to failing infrastructure. Her male co-defenders are still held on remand. More worthy of a series finale to a UK comedy, this true fable demonstrates the farce that is the prison industrial complex. It raises class consciousness in observers for whom this might be their first brush with the capitalist ideological and repressive state apparatus (Althusser). There is a long way to go but comrades should rejoice in Rosa’s six weeks of freedom, upon which her trial result will be decided, and she might be imprisoned for a maximum of ten years.
When Rosa went to pick up her letters, she had five bags of correspondence, in comparison to the usual one. This is not because Rosa is a ‘celebrity’: she is a regular person with no Wikipedia page (at the time of writing), who invested time in her community prior to going into prison, for its own sake. There is no guarantee you will get a lot of prison letters just from being an activist, a communist, an anarchist or from having a hardworking prison support team. We must be outgoing and consistent in our relationships while we can.
To write to all Just Stop Oil (19) and Palestine Action (16) prisoners, please email emailallprisoners@gmail.com.
To write to just the 16 Palestine Action prisoners, please email palactprisoners@protonmail.com.
You can also request post-prison contact information for those who have been released.
Submitted by Anonymous
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