A PEACE campaigner said today that she was disappointed not to take her arguments to court as prosecutors have dropped charges against her for obstructing the entrance to a US military surveillance base in Yorkshire.

Lindis Percy has been campaigning for decades for the closure of Menwith Hill, a high-tech base linked to satellites that feed economic, political and military information to the Pentagon.

The base is nominally an RAF centre but is run by the US National Security Agency, with a staff of about 1,000 US military and civilian personnel.

Ms Percy, a former midwife, has been arrested hundreds of times for her protests at Menwith Hill and other US military bases in Britain.

Following her latest arrest by Ministry of Defence Police (MDP) at Menwith Hill, she had intended to use her court appearance to question the jurisdiction of the MDP, which is not answerable to police authorities or commissioners.

She also wanted to raise issues of human rights and the right to freedom of assembly and speech.

But the obstruction of the highway charges against her have been dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

She said: “The reason the CPS give is that the decision to discontinue these charges has been taken because there is not enough evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction.

“The other reason is that they do not want these cases in court. The MDP is an unaccountable ‘police force’ and generally know very little about the law, abuse their power and act unprofessionally.

“I am not happy that this case has been discontinued.”