Lawyers and campaigners in the United Kingdom will rely on reports that they say show overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum when they launch a major legal challenge against the vote’s result at London’s High Court on Dec. 7.
Researchers have spent two years amassing evidence that they say proves Russia sought to and likely succeeded in influencing the British referendum, held in June 2016, on leaving the 28-member European Union.
Lawyers will use that evidence when they question the government’s legal right to see Brexit through, in what many observers are saying is a last-ditch attempt to challenge the legality of Brexit.
In court, lawyers will speak for many anti-Leave campaigners when they argue that Russian efforts to influence the vote, among other things, have damaged the credibility of the result so badly that the British government and Prime Minister Theresa May should consider the outcome fraudulent and abandon Brexit entirely.
The Leave campaign won the Brexit referendum by a slim margin of 1.89 percent and some experts say that Russian influence up to and before polling day was considerable enough to swing the result.
“Four reports from the US and UK on the Brexit poll have damaged the legitimacy of the vote,” wrote Ewan McGaughey, a law lecturer at Kings College London on Nov. 14.
“They [the reports] documented the Kremlin-backed cyber-war, the harvesting of UK voters’ personal data, criminal overspending, and how the biggest donation to Brexit, £8.4 million by Arron Banks, may not have come from the UK.”
Arron Banks is accused by some of financing the Leave campaign with foreign money, an accusation he denies. The UK Electoral Commision investigated Banks and has referred the situation to the National Crime Agency who have opened an investigation.
On Dec. 7, the High Court in London will begin hearing from two constitutional lawyers that Brexit should be voided and the triggering of Article 50 – a clause that begins the withdrawal of a country from the EU – be nullified.
The case, which begins on Dec. 7, is called Wilson v Prime Minister.
“The question is whether a free and fair vote is one of the constitutional requirements of the United Kingdom,” writes McGaughey. “Wilson and the other claimants submit that it is.”
One report that lawyers will rely on heavily is a July 2018 study published by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport select committee that concluded Russia had engaged in “unconventional warfare” against the UK during the Brexit campaign.
The report concludes that 156,252 Russian social media accounts were actively posting and Tweeting about #Brexit during the vote, with 45,000 Brexit messages shared in the last 48 hours of the campaign alone.
Other reports and media investigations have found that much of such social media activity comes from so-called “troll factories” in places like St. Petersburg, Moscow and Krasnodar, where English-speaking “commentators” are paid by the Kremlin to engage online with western, political discourse.
“This alone is damning,” writes McGaughey. “But we know it is nowhere near the full extent, because Facebook and Alphabet (which owns YouTube and Google) have not been forced to disclose how their platforms were exploited.”
