Palestine Action ban ruled unlawful

Judicial review concludes that the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization was unlawful and disproportionate, and an unacceptable attack on freedom of speech and protest.

How the FT reported today’s wonderful news.

YES! A judicial review in the High Court in London has found that ministers “acted unlawfully” when they proscribed the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization.

The ruling is a major blow for the government, which imposed its widely-condemned ban last summer, in response to the group’s activists seeking to shut down factories owned by the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, to prevent their use in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Three senior judges said that, “while Palestine Action uses criminality to promote its aims, its activities had not crossed the very high bar to make it a terrorist organization.”

Dame Victoria Sharp, one of the three judges, called the proscription “disproportionate”, and also noted that there had been “very significant interference with the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.”

Since the proscription, the government has faced worldwide ridicule, as over 2,700 UK citizens have been arrested as terrorists for peacefully holding up signs supporting Palestine Action. Hundreds of criminal prosecutions are now in “disarray”, as the FT described it.

The ruling comes a week after another blow for the government, when a jury failed to convict six Palestine Action members arrested after an action at Elbit Systems in August 2024, who had been on remand for 18 months, and had engaged in hunger strikes to protest the injustice of their detention.

Huda Ammori, the co-founder of Palestine Action, who challenged the proscription order, said after the ruling, “This is a monumental victory both for our fundamental freedoms here in Britain and in the struggle for freedom for the Palestinian people, striking down a decision that will forever be remembered as one of the most extreme attacks on free speech in recent British history.”

Ammori, as Declassified UK described it, “won on two of the four grounds that she brought in her challenge. The court found that the proscription decision violated rights enshrined in UK law, namely freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly and association with others.” The court “also upheld her claims that [forner home secretary Yvette] Cooper’s decision to proscribe the group was not consistent with the Home Office’s own policy.

The ban will, however, remain in place until a further hearing on February 20 to decide what should happen next, and meanwhile the government has immediately appealed the ruling, reinforcing, as ever, how they continue to act on behalf of Israel, and on behalf of the purported right of any company, however genocidal their actions, to be protected by appallingly heavy-handed legislation.

See below for a video of my song ‘We Are All Palestine Action’, which I wrote last summer just before the ban was enacted, and recoded yesterday, to post today whatever the outcome of the review.

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