The High Court has declared that the Palestine Action ban is unlawful, but the group remains proscribed for now, pending further hearings and a likely appeal by the government.
As they waited for the High Court decision, pro-Gaza activists feared the worst. Previous hearing since the group was proscribed in July had seen small victories. Mr Justice Chamberlain had accepted that campaigners were entitled to challenge the Home Secretary’s decision through judicial review. The Court of Appeal upheld that decision in October. It also permitted the founder of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori, to amend and strengthen her appeal by adding new grounds.
When a campaign is “proscribed,” or added to the list of terrorist groups, the law draws a sharp distinction. It allows anyone to campaign against the banning of the outlawed group. At the same time, it forbids any expression of support for them. Where support takes the form of wearing or displaying an item, for example a placard, the maximum jail term is 6 months. For any other expression of support the maximum term is 14 years’ imprisonment. Campaigners have tried to show the arbitrary nature of those rules by drawing up placards with messages which called for deproscription, or did not support Palestine Action but said they opposed that group, or encouraged support for an obviously-fake alternative such as “Plasticine Action”. If you look just at the narrow wording of any of our anti-terror laws, those acts should all be perfectly lawful. But, in reality, police officers have arrested the people on demonstrations who have advertised those messages. There are now more than 1,000 people altogether waiting to see if prosecutors will charge them. Their cases could not be decided before the decision in the judicial review for fear that the High Court might declare proscription unlawful.
On 6 September, police took into captivity 890 people attending a demonstration called by Defend our Juries to protest the proscription of Palestine Action. Five hundred people were detained at the next mass protest, on 4 October, another 143 arrested on the first day of this High Court hearing. In total, around 2,500 people have been arrested.
The decision over Palestine Action also reflects broader international politics. One of the facts revealed in the most recent hearings was that Keir Starmer had discussed the group’s proscription with Donald Trump. The President had called its members “terrorists” after they dug up the green at his Scottish golf course in March 2025.
Lawyers acting for Huda Ammori argued that, under human rights law, protesters have a right to freedom of expression, and that declaring Palestine Action terrorist was an excessive infringement of protesters’ free speech rights. Her barrister Raza Husain KC pointed out that in all the 32 previous executive orders proscribing other groups, no government had ever sought to criminalise a “direct action civil disobedience organisation”. Palestine Action, he said, had planned hundreds of protests. Almost none had gone further than criminal damage. He said, “proscription is repugnant to the tradition of the common law and contrary to the European convention on human rights … The Suffragettes would have been liable to proscription if the Terrorism Act 2000 regime had been in force at the turn of the 20th century.”
In the previous court proceedings, Mr Justice Chamberlain accepted that Palestine Action had not participated in “violence against any person or endanger[ed] life or create[d] a risk to health or safety”. The question, ever since, has been whether it could possibly be legitimate under anti-terror legislation to ban a group which does not satisfy the ordinary definition of terrorism. A terrorist is someone who uses violence and relies on the fear it generates to demand concessions from its opponents. Palestine Action is something different. Those opposed to proscription would say it is a much more normal, familiar, form of political protest.
The difficulty for campaigners was that the senior judiciary has become less willing to challenge ministers since 2020, when Lady Hale stood down as President of the Supreme Court. You can see this mindset in every area of civil and criminal law but especially in relation to protest. There, judges have removed defences such as necessity and human rights which green and anti-war campaigners had previously been able to invoke in support of their protests. When UN special rapporteur Michel Forst said that that the way Britain treats climate protesters is “not acceptable in a democracy”, he was complaining not about the politicians (although all three of our main parties have supported laws to restrict the right to protest) but the judges and the ever-longer terms to which they sentence those who participate in protests.
For this reason, the decision of the High Court to grant judicial review comes as a welcome surprise.
That said, the decision is unlikely to be the end of the matter. There is every chance of appeal, first to the Court of Appeal and then probably to the Supreme Court. The government has sunk a great deal of its authority in the issue. Keir Starmer cannot back down, nor will Shabana Mahmood. A key factor driving the will to introduce more authoritarian laws is the government’s support for the war in Gaza. Opinion polls suggest a large majority of people are distressed by Israel’s military actions. In the most recent Ipsos poll 53 per cent of respondents said that Israel had gone too far. Ministers know what the majority think and want the peace protesters to be silent. Any change of policy would only make the government look even weaker. Ministers have committed to stay the course and will continue to look for no way of criminalising protesters, no matter what any future set of judges decide.
Protesters, for, now, are rightly jubilant. Ms Ammori said, after the decision had been announced, “Today’s landmark ruling is a victory for freedom for all, and I urge the Government to respect the Court’s decision and bring this injustice to an end without further delay.” She must be conscious of her several thousand arrested supporters whose best chance of avoiding a criminal conviction remains winning a decision from the higher courts that proscription was unlawful. Several pro-Palestine prisoners are on remand (i.e. in jail waiting trial). They include two dozen prisoners, who were arrested between August 2024 and July 2025 in relation to protests at Elbit Norton and Brize Norton. Prison officers perceived them to support Palestine Action, even though the prisoners deny that, and those protest actions took place before the group was proscribed. Since proscription, prison staff have treated them like terrorists: censoring their post, their access to books, to their telephones, and other prisoners. Staff have kept them shackled, even when they were using the toilet. Proscription has caused them personally a very great deal of suffering – last winter, several spent seven weeks on hunger strike.
The government’s attempt to criminalise pro-Palestine protest has not been ended by the High Court’s judgment. Rather it is likely to be a recurring factor, a source of tension between left-wing voters and the Labour government, all the way until the next election.
[Further reading: Why you hate Keir Starmer]
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