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A pro-Palestinian activist will not face any penalty for defacing the statue of Sir Winston Churchill in Parliament Square despite admitting in court to having spray-painted political messages on the monument.
Caspar San Giorgi, 39, was acquitted by the Southwark Crown Court of criminal damage this week over an incident in February in which he climbed onto the Churchill statue and used red spray paint to write the messages “Free Palestine”, “Stop the Genocide”, and describing Britain’s WWII leader as a “Zionist War Criminal”.
Despite the prosecution claiming that the red paint vandalism on the public property had caused £7,000 in damage, a jury found San Giorgi not guilty after arguing that he was merely trying to send a message to then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Parliament and that the paint did not permanently stain the statue, the BBC reported.
San Giorgi, who also refers to himself as Olax Outis, appeared in Parliament Square at around 4am on February 27th, equipped with a ladder and cans of spray paint.
Before scaling the Churchill statue, he removed his coat to reveal a red boiler suit with the words “I support Palestine Action”, a group that was banned by the British government in 2025 as a terrorist organisation, making it illegal to publicly support the group.
During the trial, San Giorgi proclaimed himself to be a “citizen of The Hague”, the location of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal over the war in Gaza launched following the Islamist Hamas terror attacks on October 7th, 2023.
“If I had a larger canvass and more time, I would have written if Keir Starmer doesn’t come to The Hague, The Hague will come for him,” he told the court. “My wish is to see him on trial in The Hague.”
“Whether you convict me or not is not too much of a concern for me,” San Giorgi told the jury. “Whether I get acquitted, deported, imprisoned for years, I can be proud of having spoken about injustice and I have accounted for my actions. I will accept your judgement.”
The statue honouring Churchill has become a flashpoint in recent years given its proximity to the Houses of Parliament. The monument was defaced multiple times during the Black Lives Matter uprisings earlier this decade.
The threat of vandalism was so persistent that local authorities completely encased the statue in a grey box to prevent BLM radicals from damaging it in June of 2020.
English (US)