Supreme Court to Review Legality of Palestine Action Proscription

According to BBC News, the UK's Supreme Court has granted Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori permission to appeal the proscription of her group under anti-terrorism legislation — a ban imposed in July 2025 by former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on the advice of police and security officials. The hearing has been expedited, meaning the structural legality of criminalising a direct-action network now faces its most rigorous test, after the High Court first found the ban unlawful and five Court of Appeal judges reversed that ruling unanimously. As Al Jazeera reports, Thursday's announcement came the same day dozens were arrested outside Westminster Magistrates' Court for declaring support for the group.

The Machinery of Repression

Let's be precise about what the state is actually defending. Palestine Action's offence, in the Home Office's telling, was an escalating campaign of break-ins at sites operated by Elbit — an Israeli-owned defence firm — including an incident near Bristol that caused £1.2m of damage and saw four activists jailed, one additionally sentenced for grievous bodily harm against an officer struck with a sledgehammer. Those convictions stand on their own merits; no appeal will touch them.

But proscription is a different instrument. It drags a domestic protest network into the legal architecture built for organisations like al-Qaeda, criminalising not action but association. The category is so broad that more than 2,000 people now face potential prosecution simply for declaring support at a public gathering. On Thursday alone, arrest figures for the same offence ranged between 77 and 117, depending on the outlet. An elderly woman in a wheelchair now faces up to 14 years in prison for saying "I support Palestine Action." That is not counter-terrorism. It is the criminalisation of a political constituency — and a quiet one, dressed up in the vocabulary of national security.

What the Burnham Government Decides Next

This is the test that matters. As Al Jazeera notes, Thursday's rally was the first in support of Palestine Action since Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, and his government now holds the power to scrap the proscription outright. Zack Polanski, the Green Party's first Jewish leader, has publicly demanded he do exactly that. Whether Burnham acts — or whether his pre-office apology for Labour's Gaza failures remains the cost-free variety — will tell us whether anything structural has actually shifted, or whether the apparatus of suppression simply keeps running on the same tracks the previous government laid.

The material chain is legible. An Israeli-owned defence contractor. A protest movement that targeted its UK infrastructure. A state response that escalated from trespass charges to the Terrorism Act. Each step followed the logic of the one before. The Supreme Court appeal will not unwind that chain by itself, but it forces a public reckoning with the central question: was the Terrorism Act ever the proportionate tool for policing property damage at a weapons supplier? Watch the docket after the summer recess.