By Jon Silverman Home affairs analyst 7 April 2004

What do these people have in common?

Elizabeth Winkfield, the Devon pensioner who says she will go to jail rather than pay her council tax. A Canadian-based Muslim woman who publicly rejects many of the tenets of her faith. And a number of celebrities who have turned down the offer of a knighthood?

The answer is that they have all been described as "refuseniks".

It is intriguing that a label which originated with Soviet Jews refused permission to emigrate now has an almost universal application.

But in particular, it is being used to refer to those who will not join their national army or those who believe they have a moral duty to oppose the state, even at the cost of prison.

Some of them have been telling their stories at a meeting in London, marking a year since the war against Iraq.

'Beaten by guards'

Elsa is a softly-spoken Eritrean who is applying for political asylum in the UK.

On the final day of my jail term, I woke up a freer man than I had ever been before Yishay Mor

She fled her country after being jailed for refusing to serve in the army.

"I was held for two-and-a-half years without charge, " she says. "And during that time, I was raped repeatedly and beaten by the guards. I was less than a dog."

Yishay Mor, a 37-year-old Israeli software engineer, had experienced front-line combat over many years when he refused to do his reserve service in the occupied territories.

His sentence was 28 days in prison. "When I took the decision to refuse, my test was could I explain to my five-year-old son why I would be going to prison?

"But I realised it would be much harder to explain to him some of the things I would be required to do in the occupied territories.

"On the final day of my jail term, I woke up a freer man than I had ever been before."

Official recognition

Joey, a pony-tailed former army medic, refused to go to Iraq to fight last year because he opposed the war, which he describes as "an armed robbery ".

The still small voice of the whistleblower will not be extinguished by state brutality 'Hope'

And Tony Flint, a veteran of the first Gulf conflict of 1991, said his health was destroyed when he was given 13 different vaccinations in a month and now campaigns for compensation and official recognition of Gulf War syndrome.

Perhaps the loudest applause went to a woman called Hope who campaigns on behalf of the Israeli technician, Mordechai Vanunu, who is due to be released from prison on 21 April, after serving an 18-year sentence for treason and espionage for divulging details of Israel's nuclear weapons programme.

"The still small voice of the whistleblower will not be extinguished by state brutality, " she said.

It is interesting that Vanunu began his imprisonment while Britain was digesting the implications of a verdict by an Old Bailey jury that the Ministry of Defence civil servant, Clive Ponting, was not guilty of breaking the Official Secrets Act despite his admission that he had passed classified material to an MP.

As Vanunu re-enters society, the UK is again wrestling with whistle-blowing and the 1989 Official Secrets Act, following the collapse of the case against the GCHQ translator, Katharine Gun.

The only certainty is that the war on terror will lead to more confrontations between the state and those who believe their first duty is to their own conscience.