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A Bristol woman is facing the possibility of being jailed for life – for allegedly lying down on the approach to an airport runway to stop a ‘secret’ deportation flight.

Ruth Potts is one of 15 activists facing terrorism charges for their protest at Stansted Airport almost a year ago.

The activist, from Southville in Bristol, is part of a group now known as the ‘Stansted 15’, a group who occupied an access road not used for commercial flights, but which was where a plane-full of asylum-seekers and migrants were being deported to Ghana and Nigeria.

The campaigners are each charged with obstructing or disrupting a person engaged in lawful activity and organising or taking part in a demonstration likely to interfere or obstruct Stansted Airport and members of the group will also stand trial charged with terror offences under the Aviation and Maritime Security Act.

On the first day of the trial, a large-scale protest took place outside the court in Chelmsford, where Ms Potts and the 14 other campaigners took to the dock.

Their trial is controversial – an open letter signed by leading politicians, church leaders and civil rights campaigners in Britain was published hours before the trial begun criticising the fact the 15 are being prosecuted under terrorism offences, when it is alleged they merely laid down in front of an aeroplane.

The letter was signed by David Ramsbotham, the former chief inspector of prisons, co-leader of the Green Party Caroline Lucas, actress Emma Thompson and Tottenham MP David Lammy.

If found guilty, the maximum sentence Ms Potts, 42, and the other 14 could receive is life in prison.

There has been a growing campaign against the forced deportation flights which are taking failed asylum seekers and other migrants out of Britain.

In hundreds, maybe thousands, of cases – including several from Bristol – people who were brought to the UK as children decades ago by parents invited here in the 1960s and 70s from Commonwealth countries are now finding themselves deported as adults despite no connections with the country they were born in.

On March 28, one such flight, chartered by the Border Agency, was due to take off from a non-commercial runway at Stansted Airport in Essex, in what campaigners said are ‘secret deportation flights’. The protestors said these were taking place before the appeals processes for many on board had been exhausted.

Around 100 people from all over the country, including Bristol, protested outside the court in Chelmsford on Monday morning, and pledged to be there every day the trial – which is expected to last three weeks – continues.