UK government defends Palestine Action ban in Supreme Court

A UK government lawyer on Thursday defended before Britain's highest court the banning of Palestine Action as a "terrorist" organisation, insisting that it was not a "non-violent protest group".

Palestine Action was proscribed in July 2025 after a string of protests targeting a UK military site and defence contractors that caused thousands of pounds worth of damage.

Co-founder Huda Ammori has taken the legal battle against the decision to the Supreme Court after a successful High Court appeal was overturned this year.

Several people gathered outside the London court on both days of the hearing to support Palestine Action, and at least one woman was arrested Thursday, an AFP photographer saw.

The government's decision -- which places Palestine Action in the same category as the Islamist Al-Qaeda organisation and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah -- has made publicly supporting the group a criminal offence.

Since its proscription, some 4,200 people, including many elderly, have been arrested for showing support for it, according to the Defend Our Juries campaign group which has organised demonstrations.

Lawyer James Eadie told judges that Palestine Action was not a "transparent non-violent protest group", nor "part of a long and honourable tradition of civil disobedience".

"Their activities are planned and undertaken secretly in order to avoid detection," Eadie said, adding that "serious damage to property" -- even without injury to people -- could be considered "terrorism".

The ban came weeks after Palestine Action activists broke into a Royal Air Force base in southern England and spray-painted planes, sparking criticism from human rights organisations.

The lawyer for the Home Office said that no measure other than proscription "could properly be said to be equivalently effective".

Two UK Jewish groups have made legal submissions in support of the government's ban, saying the Jewish community was "especially vulnerable to Palestine Action's violent activities".

But Ammori's lawyer Raza Husain rejected accusations of antisemitism, saying Palestine Action "never targeted Jewish people and Jewish businesses".

"There are probably hundreds of 1000s of people, at least, whose profoundly important rights of political speech, association, and assembly... have been extinguished or seriously interfered with," Husain said.

The Supreme Court judges are expected to hand down a decision at a later date.

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