The supreme court’s five judges began weighing the practical machinery of Britain’s terrorism proscription regime, hearing Huda Ammori’s challenge to the ban on Palestine Action, the direct action group placed on the same legal footing as al-Qaida and Boko Haram last year. The hearing in central London is scheduled to conclude on Thursday, with judgment expected later.
At issue is how the ban actually operates on the ground. Raza Husain KC, representing Ammori, a co-founder of the group, told the court that the effects had extended across the wider Palestinian solidarity movement, regardless of any connection with Palestine Action, and had chilled the expression of journalists, academics and artists. “Palestine Action never advocated for violence against the person and the home secretary has never advocated, and could not advocate, to the contrary,” he told the judges.
Husain argued that the group’s tactics resembled, or were less extreme than, those of the suffragettes, whose activities included arson and bombing attacks but who are now venerated as being on the right side of history. Uncontroverted evidence, he said, showed that suffragettes, anti-war groups, environmental groups and animal rights protesters all used tactics similar to or more extreme than Palestine Action, yet none were regarded as terrorists or proscribed. The court of appeal, he said, had erred by concluding that Palestine Action’s tactics had little or nothing in common with the suffragettes or Iraq war protest groups.
The Guardian’s coverage of the hearing can be found at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/nov/04/palestine-action-tactics-suffragettes-uk-supreme-court.
By contrast, Sir James Eadie KC, for the home secretary, submitted in writing that the court of appeal’s decision, the one now under appeal, was lawful and proportionate, and that it had been reinforced in two ways. He cited the convictions of four people, including one for grievous bodily harm, and the finding of a “terrorist connection” in the case of the Palestine Action activist’s raid on a factory owned by the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems in Filton, near Bristol. The ban, he added, was also reinforced by US sanctions imposed on Palestine Action as a global terrorist group.
Eadie drew a line between the proscription itself and lawful political activity, telling the court: “As a matter of law, the proscription of PA does not prevent public expressions of support for the Palestinian cause or opposition to Israel and to the Israel Defense Forces, or demonstrations targeted at Elbit.”
The enforcement gap was visible outside the court on Wednesday, where at least 25 protesters were arrested, among them Sir Jonathan Porritt, a former director of Friends of the Earth who advised the Prince of Wales, now King Charles, for more than 30 years. The protesters held placards emulating a tweet by Sarah Helm, a journalist and author married to Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s national security adviser. Police had deemed that tweet not to meet the criminal threshold for supporting a terrorist organisation.
Helm had written: “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action.” Porritt replaced the word “authors” with “CBEs”, while others swapped it with “normal people”, “professors”, “Jews”, “holocaust survivors” and “bartenders”. The last protester arrested held a placard reading: “God help us who are not married to the UK’s national security adviser who support Palestine and Palestine Action.”
The judges must now weigh the gap between what the law permits and how it is enforced. Whether their ruling narrows that gap, or widens it, will shape how the proscription regime functions in practice.