The judgment on Friday is a major blow for former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as well as the Israeli arms companies who lobbied for a crackdown on the group, John McEvoy, Dania Akkad and Martin Williams report.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper visiting the National Crime Agency in September 2024. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By John McEvoy, Dania Akkad and Martin Williams
Declassified UK
The Home Office’s decision to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group last year was unlawful, a three-judge panel at the High Court has ruled.
In a hearing on Friday, Dame Victoria Sharp, one of the judges, said there had been “very significant interference with the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.”
The court, she said, considered the proscription of the group “disproportionate.”
Despite the ruling, the group will remain proscribed until a further court order because it has “yet to hear argument on whether there should be a stay of any order setting aside the proscription order pending the possibility of appeal,” the judges said.
The judgment is a major blow for former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as well as the Israeli arms companies who lobbied for a crackdown on the group.
It will be a relief for over 2,700 protesters who have been arrested for showing support for the group since the controversial ban.
The ruling comes a week after a jury decided not to convict six Palestine Action members accused of some of the most serious criminal charges leveled against the group.
Huda Ammori, the co-founder of Palestine Action who challenged the proscription order, said on Friday:
“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 won on two of the four grounds that she brought in her challenge. The court found that the proscription decision violated rights enshrined in U.K. law, namely freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly and association with others.
It also upheld her claims that Cooper’s decision to proscribe the group was not consistent with the Home Office’s own policy.
British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmo0d in September 2025. (James Whatling / Parsons Media for the Home Office/Flicker/CC BY 4.0)
The government will appeal the decision. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the court had acknowledged that Palestine Action had carried out acts of terrorism and that it was “not an ordinary protest or civil disobedience group”.
“For those reasons, I am disappointed by the court’s decision and disagree with the notion that banning this terrorist organisation is disproportionate,” Mahmood said.
The decision to authorise a judicial review had been made in part to expedite the unprecedented number of terrorism-related cases moving through the courts.
‘A Lot of Uncertainty’
Around 40 protesters stood outside the court on Friday ahead of the ruling, holding Palestine Action placards, poised for arrest with several Metropolitan Police vans parked nearby.
But police officers at the scene told Declassified that they hadn’t been given orders to make arrests.
In a subsequent statement, the force clarified that it is now focused on gathering evidence of those showing support for the group for potential future enforcement, rather than making arrests.
Roars and celebration erupted outside the court soon after the ruling was read out, but questions remain about exactly what will happen next.
One protester holding a placard told Declassified: “I’m relieved but there is still a lot of uncertainty in my mind about where this is headed.”
The court has directed parties to provide written submissions by 20 February on next steps in light of the judgement.
‘Honourable History’
Sign at a pro-Palestine demonstration in the U.K., June 2025. (Palestine Action)
The ban on Palestine Action was announced in June 2025 shortly after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint into the turbines of two military aircraft used for refuelling and transport.
Cooper told Parliament that month: “The U.K.’s defence enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this Government will not tolerate those who put that security at risk”.
An order was pushed through Parliament in July which added Palestine Action to the list of banned groups under the Terrorism Act 2000.
The Home Office included two Russian neo-Nazi organisations, the Maniac Murder Cult and Russian Imperial Movement, within the same order.
It marked the first time in British history that the government used terrorism legislation to ban a civil disobedience organisation. Only 26 out of 650 MPs voted against the ban.
Raza Husain KC, representing Ammori, told the High Court in November that “civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country,” arguing that Palestine Action followed in the footsteps of direct action protest groups stretching back centuries.
“It is the mark of a civilised society that protests of this type can be accommodated,” Husain added. “Our client Ms. Ammori has been inspired by a long tradition of direct action in this country from the suffragettes to anti-apartheid activists to Iraq war protesters.”
Iran
The Home Office sought to justify the ban on Palestine Action by briefing the press that the group might be funded by Iran.
On June 23, the day of Cooper’s statement to parliament, the Times published a report saying “Iran could be funding Palestine Action, Home Office officials claimed.”
It added: “Officials are understood to be investigating its source of donations amid concerns that the Iranian regime, via proxies, is funding the group’s activities given that their objectives are aligned.”
Shortly afterwards, the Daily Mail asked: “Does Palestine Action’s cash trail lead all the way to Iran?” with GB News, the Spectator, and the Telegraph also picking up on the story.
This point was contested by the U.K.’s independent expert on terrorism, Jonathan Hall KC, who told Channel 4 News earlier this week that those press briefings were “wrong.”
Hall was “not aware” of any evidence behind those claims, he added.
British intelligence reports first exposed by Declassified in July indicated that the ban was in fact largely driven by Palestine Action’s impact on the Israeli arms industry in Britain.
John McEvoy is chief reporter for Declassified UK. John is an historian and filmmaker whose work focuses on British foreign policy and Latin America. His PhD was on Britain’s Secret Wars in Colombia between 1948 and 2009, and he is currently working on a documentary about Britain’s role in the rise of Augusto Pinochet.
Dania Akkad is an investigative journalist. She has won awards for her reporting on women’s rights in the Middle East, Saudi Arabian dissidents and California’s lettuce industry. She started her career covering crime and agribusiness at daily newspapers in California, and then reported from Syria as a freelance journalist before the war, including investigating the 2005 suicide bombing in Amman that killed members of her family. She served most recently as senior investigations editor at Middle East Eye.
Martin Williams is Declassified UK’s chief investigator. He previously worked for The Guardian, Channel 4 News and openDemocracy, where he was U.K. investigations editor. His book, Parliament Ltd, exposed widespread corruption in British politics and sparked multiple inquiries by Westminster authorities. Martin has published investigations on issues ranging from lobbying and dark money, to espionage and human rights.
This article is from Declassified UK.
“The judgment on Friday is a major blow for former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper”
… does that mean that she is now likely to face prison time for illegally locking up other people, or for the mass denial of basic human rights to the population she ruled by trying out her enforcement of “thought crime”?
After all, that’s what all of this has been. His Majesty’s Government declared that support for Palestine Action was an Illegal Thought. It was enforced that thou shall not speak a thought that His Majesty, through his Ministers, has declared to be an Illegal Thought. Today they may have suffered a setback in this particular declaration. But no one will pay any real cost for a huge attack on the basic human rights of His Majesty’s Subjects.
No, in the UK’s class based system, she’ll be well rewarded for her service to the upper class. And since class is now based entirely on money instead of blood, her children will have a leg up for further advancement up the class ladder, till someday perhaps they will be telling Prime Ministers and their Cabinets what to do. This is what is called Justice in all the class based societies descended from European Imperialism.
But at least some decent people who appear to still have functioning souls have been declared to have legal thoughts again, at least for today.
After this, in addition to the the Mandelson/Eptstein scandal, I’m disappointed that the highly unpopular Starmer regime has lasted this long. When will these bottom-feeders be ejected?
Will cycling the figurehead at the top of the machine work any better for Labour than it did for the Tories?
The British changed their system awhile back so it more locks a party into power for a set number of years. This means what we saw with the Tories, perhaps a succession of less and less talented prime ministers as they work their way down the bench. Using cabinet ministers like baseball uses relief pitchers. Eventually, their innings run out, hopefully before they get too terribly deep into their bullpen (down to the ones that really shouldn’t even be in the big leagues), and they have to let the voters get a say in a media and money dominated election.
A Labour MP right now does not what to see an election. At best a demotion to the minority. At worst, having to get a real job. So they avoid elections and will likely cycle the PM’s instead. Same as the Tories just did. As long as that Labour majority stays united in not wanting an election, they can just stall until they are forced by the calendar to have elections. And, just like with the Tories, cycling the PM’s within the same majority does not produce any real change and certainly no hope.
Wow, a baseball metaphor to explain British politics. Take it for what’s it worth from far distant bleachers. Serves them right, because I think I recall some of them making this change because of desire to make their PM to be more like an American President … power without the restriction of having to worry about pesky no confidence votes.
In a modern democracy, wouldn’t it be Great if horribly bad approval ratings from the voters could force new elections? Might even make people want to talk to pollsters. I think it kinda be nice to see a President sweating at 50.0% knowing that if they drop any further then they have to answer to the voters. Kinda like watching a basketball coach who knows they’re gonna get fired if that teenager misses this easy free throw.
Sad but true. Some “democracy” eh. The will of the overwhelming majority of the population can simply be ignored. Like the US, UK “voters” have nowhere to go, there is no way to vote against the interests of the oligarchy.
So-called democracy has been reduced to a series of PR stunts and the election charade results in significant choice: Vote C, you get genocide, war, kleptocracy and decline. Vote L and you get genocide, war, kleptocracy and decline. That’s the “choice” Who is the lesser genocide?
Whatever the result of an appeal it is clear that a political decision has been challenged in a Court of Law with success. Politicians need to take cognisance of that and tread very carefully. We in the UK must not adopt any institutional antipathy to those who have a right to robust peaceful public protest.
From the other side of the pond ….
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
President John F. Kennedy.
hxxps://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-first-anniversary-the-alliance-for-progress
Its even more interesting when in context …
“I know the difficulties of such a task. It is unprecedented. Our own history shows how fierce the resistance can be to changes which later generations regard as part of the normal framework of life. And the course of rational social change is even more hazardous for those progressive governments who often face entrenched privilege of the right and subversive conspiracies on the left.
For too long my country, the wealthiest nation in a continent which is not wealthy, failed to carry out its full responsibilities to its sister Republics. We have now accepted that responsibility. In the same way those who possess wealth and power in poor nations must accept their own responsibilities. They must lead the fight for those basic reforms which alone can preserve the fabric of their societies. Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Approximately 1 year and 8 months later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
The UK must resist says Julian Assange!
Shaking the table on the house of cards!
Great job guys!