Huda Ammori v Secretary of State for the Home Department

Nick King observed proceedings at the Royal Courts of Justice

22 July 2025

Photo: Discovery Analytical Resourcing

The proscription of Palestine Action:
"... repugnant to the tradition of the common law"

Raza Husain KC

Subsequent to their unsuccessful application to stay Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's proscription order nominating Palestine Action, legal representatives for Huda Ammori returned to the Royal Courts of Justice in London yesterday with an application to take the case to judicial review.

Similar to the prior proceedings, the respective arguments were largely characterised by their stances apart: the Claimant demonstrating the substantive damage provoked by misapplication of decretal authority; the Defence advancing the prescriptive requirements of regulatory protocol.

Raza Husain KC, opening for the Claimant, offered that the Secretary of State's proscription order targeting Palestine Action had positioned the United Kingdom as an international outlier, a measure "repugnant to the tradition of the common law and contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights" (ECHR). Palestine Action's obstructive activism had never advocated violence against the person and specifically identified organisations in the arms' supply chain to the Israeli military. Such acts of property damage undertaken by Palestine Action could not proportionately be characterised as 'terrorism'.

Husain cited the fact that the Joint Terrorism Advisory Centre - the security service charged with conveying to the Government terrorism-related intelligence - concluded with respect to Palestine Action that it considered only three out of 385 logged incidents possibly classifiable as 'terrorist'. The Secretary of State's resort to proscription should then be seen to be unreasonable and irrational, since criminal law already existed for prosecution of such infractions. As the corrective vehicle to assess alleged excesses of the political executive, judicial review would be the procedure most appropriate expeditiously to redress the damage caused by the order's issuance.

Reckless Implementations

Justice Chamberlain, who presided also over the Claimant's prior application for a stay of proscription on 4 July, had then set out in his judgment that the order could apply no retroactive powers and that its reach was limited to behaviour particularly supportive of Palestine Action. In the short period since its inception however, the impact of the proscription order had substantially exceeded its intended narrow ostracism of Palestine Action to ensnare generic public expressions of political solidarity with Palestine.

Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC (acting for the Claimant) outlined dozens of instances nationwide where cases had involved police threats of arrest and sweepingly restrictive bail conditions in spite of no specific reference to Palestine Action. The order's chilling effect was substantial and its fluidity in scope an infringement of the wider community's Article 14 protections under the ECHR. Chamberlain remarked that it appeared the officers involved in such incidents evidently had no understanding of the law ... to which Ní Ghrálaigh appended that the Secretary of State had neither issued any statement distancing the Government from overzealous policing.

The question was raised of compatibility with a democratic society for a schedule of serious criminal charges of strict liability that will attach to an organisation at the government's discretion while avoiding overt procedural scrutiny. In addition to the order's disproportionality, Ní Ghrálaigh also emphasised its tentative connection to interests of national security. While Palestine Action had damaged aircraft based at RAF Brize Norton, that incident had not formed part of the intelligence dossier considered by the Secretary of State* and had provided ex-post the sole citation of an act levelled at British military assets.

POAC

For the Defence, Sir James Eadie KC presented a detailed case relying on the statutory provision in the Terrorism Act 2000 (s.4) for formal application to deproscribe an organisation, once it had been added to the Act's Schedule 2 by the Secretary of State. That avenue - porting the legislative intention of Parliament - rather than judicial review, should be the route adopted by an organisation to petition for deproscription. Much was made of the desirability to avoid duplicating juridical resources, as well as the dedicated expertise resident, should there be an eventual appeal, at the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission (POAC). It was argued that judicial review would intercede procedurally where the Act had intended such matters to return to the Secretary of State, although here the issue was a challenge to proscription, not deproscription, and contention centred around the exercise of the Secretary of State's discretion. Judicial review had evolved, after all, to concern itself with misapplication of executive authority.

Justice Chamberlain also highlighted that consideration by POAC would exclude potential remedy for a considerable number of individuals not actively implicated in the organisation's proscription as such but caught in the interim by accessory offences stipulated by the Act. Palestine Action's application and appeal via POAC would require an uncertain yet extended period of several months - meanwhile the numbers so prosecuted could multiply substantially.

The Court's decision on the application for judicial review will be delivered on 30 July 2025. Since the activation of the proscription order on 5 July 2025, 1,745 Gazans have been killed and over 5,000 injured as a result of Israel's daily military operations.

* It could also be noted, by way of ancillary observation, that the loss to the Ministry of Defence is financial rather than a matter of its defensive capacity. Craig Murray revealed that utimate ownership of the Voyager fleet of transport aircraft, through a tower of offshore holding companies, resides with an international hedge fund, not the UK Government.