The most astonishing part of his speech relates to the third charge: criminal damage. The defendants have only one available defence against this. In legal parlance, it is called “lawful excuse”. It means that any criminal damage they caused can be viewed as lawful because it was designed to prevent the commission of a far graver crime – in this case genocide.

At one point in the trial a jury member sent a note to the judge, Mr Justice Johnson, asking this very question: “If we decide that they [the defendants] genuinely believe that they were performing life-saving action and were morally compelled to destroy weapons they believed were going to be used to kill civilians in what they believe to be an illegal genocide, would that amount to a lawful excuse?”

The judge, who repeatedly stifled efforts by the defence to air evidence of Elbit System’s involvement in the genocide, answered that the jury must not take into account such “lawful excuse”. In his words: “There is no evidence in this case of anything that is capable in law of amounting to a lawful excuse, so that is not something that you need to consider.”

Menon refuses to take this lying down and eloquently defies the judge’s ruling and does so in a way that skates close to, but carefully avoids, contempt of court.

He makes a rousing defence of the right of juries to reject judicial interference, and of their right to make up their own minds both on guilt and on factors that might mitigate guilt – and he does so at the very moment when Starmer and his ministers are seeking to eradicate the principle of jury trials.

All of Menon’s speech is worth reading, though it is very long. I append here just a small section: his direct challenge to the trial judge – with the most defiant passage highlighted in bold. It is a powerful defence of one of our fundamental rights, rights that are gradually being whittled away by growing establishment authoritarianism.