My Medical Records

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

This is very difficult for me to do, as I am perhaps guilty of too much pride.

It is fairly generally known I am not very well, and that I occasionally am taken ill and don’t show, or have to leave events, and can be peculiarly hard to contact. But I think I need to explain the situation now, because of the prison sentence imposed on me. Eight months jail for contempt of court for “jigsaw identification”, on a first offence of any kind at the age of 62 years, surprised a number of people, including me.

In sentencing remarks, Lady Dorrian stated specifically that the sentence took account of my medical conditions, including pulmonary hypertension. To be clear, the court was informed by two doctors, one extremely distinguished who has treated me for over twenty years, of my medical conditions which include:

Pulmonary Hypertension
Atrial Fibrillation
Enlarged heart, both left and right
Cardiac Syncope with loss of consciousness
Recurrent pulmonary embolism
Anti-phospholipid syndrome (a diagnosis by one very famous university hospital and disputed by another)
“Floppy” mitral valve
Bipolar disorder (first diagnosed and treated in 1978)
Hiatus hernia
severe gastric reflux
Barrett’s oesophagus
Recurrent dislocation of both shoulders.

There has been no dispute from the Crown and the court states it has taken these conditions into account in sentencing. These above are all current conditions.

The court saw also specified past illnesses requiring hospitalisation which I have survived include peritonitis, typhoid fever, malaria and various undefined tropical infections.

This is an excerpt from the Opinion of one of the doctors:

To the best of my knowledge, the court in fact made no inquiries of the prison service as to its ability to deal with my medical conditions before pronouncing sentence. If it did, I have not been informed.

This next is an excerpt from the official social work report, commissioned by the court, which the court has a statutory duty to consider in sentencing. Note it states a community service order is not possible, even though I expressed willingness to undertake it, as they consider me too unwell:

I would like you to understand what it is like to cope, day to day, with these health problems. This from the Pulmonary Hypertension Association describes almost exactly my own symptoms, and I have devised extremely similar coping strategies. However it is a degenerative illness and in the last year or so I have got rather worse than this, and now find I need every day to sleep at least two, and sometimes up to six, hours in the afternoon and early evening, just from sheer exhaustion of the morning. I sometimes can’t be woken from this sleep; there is a continuum between sleeping from exhaustion, fainting from dizziness and sudden loss of consciousness, and sometimes it is hard to know where each episode lies on that continuum.

Please note the PHA are not commenting on my specific case (of which they have no knowledge), but providing general information about the illness.

I want you to imagine coping with this in prison. As the court was told by my QC, pulmonary hypertension has a major impact on life expectancy. Remember that is just one of my major medical conditions.

Now I was reluctant to tell you all this, not only because it is private and I have based my life for years around hiding it, but also because we are going to appeal not just my sentence but the whole judgement. Our case is that I did not identify accusers and that the court’s application of jigsaw identification is far too unspecific. Only after that comes the argument that it is a disproportionate sentence; there is a name for the kind of country that jails dissident writers.

But to impose a jail sentence on somebody with my medical conditions, who is officially, by the court’s own report, assessed as both vulnerable in prison and no threat to the community, is simply inhumane. That humanitarian concern will weigh heavier with some people than other arguments, and is why I have decided to release this extremely personal information today.

The key point is; this is not an oversight, the court knew all this. And specifically claimed to take it into account in the sentence.

I need to check what century this is.

I hope that you now see that, when we go back this week to lodge with this same court again an application to be allowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, it is crucial to my family and I to succeed.

You can contribute to my defence fund here. I am extremely grateful to those who have and I want to stress that I absolutely do not want anybody to contribute if it causes them even the slightest financial difficulty. Our fund for the Supreme Court appeal has already passed over £100,000, from over 7,000 donors, including £10,000 from the great Vivienne Westwood. I am extremely grateful to everyone, and the smallest donation so far (38 pence) was just as welcome. I am afraid to say that the amounts we need to raise remain ridiculous; this fact is of course all part of the implementation of suppression, by “lawfare”.

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