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The protest group Palestine Action is to be designated a terrorist organisation in the UK after losing a High Court challenge to temporarily block the Home Office from banning it.
Following the ruling on Friday afternoon, the ban will come into force at midnight, making it a criminal offence — punishable by up to 14 years in prison — to belong to or support the pro-Palestinian organisation.
The London court rejected an application by the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori, who had asked to halt the proscription until she could make the full legal case at a hearing later this month that banning Palestine Action would be unlawful.
Justice Martin Chamberlain said: “The harm which will ensue if interim relief is refused, but the claim later succeeds, is insufficient to outweigh the strong public interest in maintaining the order in force.”
Ben Watson KC, a lawyer representing the Home Office, said that a temporary block to the proscription would be a “serious disfigurement of the statutory regime”.
Parliament voted to ban Palestine Action this week, following an incident in which its members broke into Brize Norton, the country’s largest air base, and damaged military aircraft with red spray paint and crowbars.
The incident, which involved two people entering the Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire on electric scooters and leaving undetected, prompted the Ministry of Defence to launch a security review across UK military bases.
The legal team representing Ammori argued that property damage alone did not meet the threshold of terrorism, and that the designation could have indiscriminate consequences for thousands of the group’s supporters who were not involved in direct action.
Raza Husain KC, Ammori’s lawyer, called the proscription “an ill-considered, discriminatory . . . abuse of statutory power” that resembled the tactics of authoritarian governments trying to stifle public dissent.
“The evidence shows that this is an ‘I am Spartacus’ type moment. This is a civil disobedience movement, and they will carry on,” he added.
Late on Friday, the Court of Appeal rejected a rare urgent bid by Palestine Action to reverse the court ruling.
Crowds had gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Friday, setting off flares and chanting pro-Palestine slogans.Some protesters reported clashes with police officers on social media.
MPs had approved the proscription by a wide margin on Wednesday. A heated debate was held in the House of Lords on Thursday even as peers also approved the ban. Lord Peter Hain, a former cabinet minister under Tony Blair’s Labour government, said: “If you start labelling people as terrorists willy-nilly right across the board, you go down a very dangerous route”.
“There are plenty of other criminal offences that such activity could attract rather than treating young people as terrorists because they feel frustrated about the failure to stop mass killings and bombings of Palestinians in Gaza,” he added.
Palestine Action, founded in 2020, has targeted Israeli-linked defence companies operating in the UK. Four activists, aged between 22 and 35, were charged on Thursday by counterterrorism police in connection to the Brize Norton break-in.