Visa refused to former radical activist

Judith Clark, seventy-seven, was invited by the Royal Shakespeare Company to speak about rehabilitation and restorative justice at a production of Julius Caesar in Stratford-upon-Avon next month.The Home Office refused her visa application last week.

Clark also planned to attend book launch

Clark had hoped to visit Britain from four to fifteen November with her wife, Cheryl Moch.She also wanted to attend the UK launch of her daughter Harriet Clark's first novel, The Hill, on five November.

Who is Judith Clark

Clark joined the student movement against the Vietnam War in the late nineteen sixties and became involved in the Weather Underground, a radical organisation that emerged from the American anti-war movement.

Convicted in nineteen eighty-three

In nineteen eighty-three, Clark was convicted for her role as a getaway driver in an attempted robbery of a Brinks armoured truck in New York in nineteen eighty-one, during which a security guard and two…

Released after thirty-seven years

In two thousand seventeen, then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo commuted Clark's sentence, allowing her to seek parole.She was released in two thousand nineteen, after serving thirty-seven years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York.

Extensive prison reform work

During her incarceration, Clark helped establish an AIDS education and support group, developed programmes to help mothers maintain relationships with their children, raised service dogs for veterans and first responders and helped build a college…

Theatre figures back her visa bid

Harriet Walter, who portrayed prisoners in the Donmar Warehouse all-female Shakespeare trilogy, said Clark had helped her understand Brutus in Julius Caesar and Prospero in The Tempest.

“There is no other purpose behind the short visit she wants to make other than to reward us with her presence as a speaker in our post-show conversation and to celebrate her daughter's first book launch.”

Helena Kennedy calls for ministerial discretion

Lawyer Helena Kennedy said while the Home Office had rules governing visas for people with serious criminal convictions, there was also ministerial discretion, which should be exercised in Clark's case.

“This is a woman in her seventies who served a long sentence for political activism, which involved no violence on her part, and whose clear remorse and exceptional works within the prison system led to her early release.”

Home Office declines to comment

A Home Office spokesperson said it was longstanding policy not to comment on individual cases.