Supreme Court defers verdict on Palestine Action ban appeal

The co-founder of Palestine Action faces a wait to find out whether the Supreme Court will quash the ban on the group. Huda Ammori has taken a legal battle against the government’s decision to proscribe the group under the Terrorism Act 2000 to the UK’s highest court in a bid to overturn the prohibition. The case has come to the Supreme Court after Ammori challenged the then-home secretary Yvette Cooper’s 2025 decision to ban the group at the High Court, with three judges finding in February that it was unlawful.

But five Court of Appeal judges overturned the decision in June, finding the ban was lawful and a “justified and proportionate” interference with freedom of expression rights. At the end of the public Supreme Court hearing on Thursday, the justices said they would reserve their decision to a later date, after hearing further arguments in private. Lord Reed, sitting with Lords Sales, Lloyd-Jones, Briggs and Stephens, said: “We will adjourn to consider the judgment we will give.”

During the hearing, Raza Husain KC, for Ammori, told the court that the objectives of Palestine Action “were aligned with, rather than abhorrent to liberal democratic values”. In written submissions, the barrister said that only three out of 385 actions carried out by Palestine Action over a five-year period were assessed as meeting the definition of terrorism under part of the Terrorism Act. Inviting support for the group is now an offence under the same act, with the court told more than 3,000 people have been arrested since the ban, and 27 people were arrested on suspicion of displaying support for a proscribed organisation outside the central London court on Wednesday.

The Home Office, which is opposing the appeal, has said the Court of Appeal made no legal error. In written submissions, Sir James Eadie KC, for the Home Office, said the Court of Appeal had rejected Ammori’s attempt to portray Palestine Action as a “non-violent direct action protest group”. He later said acts which involved serious damage to property could be considered terrorism and the action did not need to involve violence or an intent to endanger life.

In written submissions on behalf of the Community Security Trust and the Jewish Leadership Council, Adam Wagner KC said the British Jewish community is “especially vulnerable to Palestine Action’s violent activities” as activists had attacked “Jewish charities and Jewish-owned businesses”. He said lifting the proscription would “re-arm and revitalise a sinister and dangerous movement” and could serve as a “green light” for perpetrators of “violent antisemitism more broadly”.

However, Rachel Scott KC, for the Jewish Bloc, a group of Jewish organisations in the UK which “campaign for freedom and justice for the Palestinian people”, said the claim that Palestine Action had targeted the Jewish community was a “fundamental fallacy”. She said in written submissions: “That characterisation is a fundamental misrepresentation of the underlying evidence; one which starkly illustrates the very real risk of conflation between, on the one hand, criticism of and opposition to Zionism or the actions of the state of Israel and, on the other hand, antisemitism.”