Judges to give decision on Home Office appeal over Palestine Action ban

The Home Office is set to discover whether it has successfully challenged the High Court’s ruling that the banning of Palestine Action as a terror organisation should be quashed.

Three judges ruled in February that the then-home secretary Yvette Cooper’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000 last year was unlawful, following a legal challenge from the group’s co-founder, Huda Ammori.

The ban, which began on July 5 last year, made membership of, or support for, the direct action group a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison, and has remained in force as the Home Office has attempted to challenge the ruling.

Lawyers for the department told an appeal in April that the High Court’s findings about the impact on human rights of banning Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation were “overstated and wrong”.

Barristers for Ms Ammori told the hearing in London that there were “plenty of alternative measures that could have been used” to limit Palestine Action’s activities that were “less intrusive” than banning it as a terror group.

The Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, Sir Geoffrey Vos, Lord Justice Edis, Lord Justice Lewis and Lady Justice Whipple are now due to hand down their ruling at 11am on Monday.

Thousands of people have been arrested following the proscription, with Ms Ammori’s barrister, Raza Husain KC, telling the High Court last year that the ban was an “ill-considered, discriminatory, due process-lacking, authoritarian abuse of statutory power”.

The Home Office defended the challenge, with its barrister Sir James Eadie KC telling the court in London that the ban “strikes a fair balance between interference with the rights of the individuals affected and the interests of the community”.

In a 46-page ruling in February, Dame Victoria Sharp, sitting with Mr Justice Swift and Mrs Justice Steyn, said that the “core hallmarks of civil disobedience” were “not the hallmarks of Palestine Action’s campaign”.

But she continued that only “a very small number” of the group’s actions “amounted to terrorist action”, and that these had “not yet reached the level, scale and persistence” to justify proscription.

Dame Victoria also said that Ms Cooper made a “significant” error in using her discretion to ban Palestine Action partly because of the potential advantages of proscription in disrupting the group’s activities, which the judge said was “inconsistent” with the then-home secretary’s own policy.

In the appeal, Sir James said in written submissions that “the line between criminality, sometimes violent criminality, and terrorism is not a bright one”, and that the criminal law had “demonstrably failed” to prevent the escalation of the group’s activities.

But Mr Husain said in written submissions that the High Court was right to find that the ban on the group did not correctly balance the human rights involved and that the ban on Palestine Action has created a “culture of fear” among campaigners for Palestinian rights.

A short hearing is expected on Monday where the judgment will be formally handed down.

The Court of Appeal’s decision will come after four Palestine Action activists who mounted a “terrorist” raid on Israel-based defence firm Elbit System’s UK factory were jailed.

Charlotte Head, 30, Samuel Corner, 23, Leona Kamio, 30, and Fatema Rajwani, 21, used sledgehammers and crowbars to destroy computers, drones and other equipment before police and security intervened.

Corner, a former student at Oxford, struck police officer Kate Evans twice on the back with a seven pound sledgehammer, leaving her with a fractured spine.

Mr Justice Johnson gave the four prison sentences of between seven years and eight months and four years and eight months, with each defendant also spending an extra year on licence.

During the hearing on Friday, the judge ruled that the raid amounted to an “act of terrorism”, having been carried out to try to influence the UK Government and intimidate a section of the public.

The Elbit raid was one of the triggers for the UK Government to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.