UK Supreme Court to hear appeal on Britain’s ban of Palestine Action group

LONDON — The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court has said it will hear an appeal against a lower court ruling that Britain’s decision to ban campaign group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization was lawful.

London’s Court of Appeal ruled in June that proscribing Palestine Action under terrorism laws was lawful because of its support for violence, after the High Court ruled in February that the ban unlawfully interfered with freedom of expression.

The ban, which came into force on July 5, 2025, was imposed under the country’s Terrorism Act. It made membership in or support for the protest group a criminal offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison under the terrorism legislation.

In the June ruling, Judge Sue Carr wrote that Palestine Action “is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open.”

“It is a covert organization operating with secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties,” she said.

Huda Ammori, who co-founded Palestine Action in 2020 and brought the legal challenge against proscription, was granted permission to appeal against that decision on Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s website showed.

She said in a statement: “We will continue to fight this proscription all the way to the Supreme Court and, if necessary, to the European Court of Human Rights to overturn what has become one of the most extreme attacks on free speech and the right to protest in modern British history.”

Before it was proscribed, Palestine Action had increasingly targeted Israel-linked defense companies or firms with links to them with “direct action,” often blocking entrances or spraying red paint, particularly Elbit.

The group was banned shortly after a break-in at the Royal Air Force’s Brize Norton base in June 2025, in which activists damaged two military planes.

Last month, a judge jailed four activists for raiding an Elbit site near Bristol in western England in August 2024 and causing over a million pounds in damage. One of them hit a police officer twice on the back with a sledgehammer, leaving her with a fractured spine.

Roughly 3,000 people have since been arrested for holding signs in support of Palestine Action, including dozens on Thursday outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

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