UK High Court Blocks Starmer’s Effort to Label Palestine Action a Terrorist Group
Police arresting a protester against the proscription in London, 6 September 2025. Photograph Source: indigonolan – CC BY 4.0
Last year, I was living in the UK when activists from the anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian direct action group Palestine Action hugely. embarrassed the Royal Air Force and the British government by cutting their way through a security fence surrounding an RAF Airfield in Oxfordshire and spraying red paint on the jet engines of two aircraft known to have assisted Israel’s aerial slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
While the action was only “damaging“ to the planes if one considers having to apply paint remover to the vandals’ handiwork to remove it, the Labor government of Prime Minister Keir of Starmer responded by claiming the “repairs” would cost £7 million (about US$10 million) and as such justified labeling the avowedly non-violent protest group guilty of “terrorism” under a rarely used Anti-Terrorism Law enacted in 2000, had targeted the likes of Al Qaeda and the Irish Republican Army that actually sought to kill people. Although it did list property damage, the law one the quarter of q century of its being on the books has never before been against an action or an organization involved in just property damage and not seeking to harm people.
Labeling Palestine Action a terrorist group, as ludicrous as it was, in fact was and remains a serious matter for the protest organization which has been trying to force the government to stop supporting Israel’s US and UK-backed genocide in Gaza and the West Bank which was at the time slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including many children, with bombs, planes and weapons supplied by the UK and US. The action also targeted those many British citizens who were protesting over the same issue and specifically the effort to silence and destroy Palestine Action. This is because not only does the Antiterrorism Act cary a penalty for being part of a designated terror organization of up to 14 years in jail. It also makes simply protesting for or speaking or writing favorably about or even just holding a sign supporting a designated terror organization.
I was dismayed to see Britain’s long history of supporting freedom of speech and protest (a tradition dating back to the Magna Carta and that inspired the addition of the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech, press, religion, association and protest to the US Constitution), so casually trashed by PM Starmer and his Labour majority, their fatuous labeling of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization.
I was I should say, dismayed but not surprised. PM Starmer, whose official résumé highlights his past experience as a human rights lawyer — one who ironically once in 2003 passionately and successfully defended another protest group’s similar break-in and damaging of RAF planes in protest against Britain’s joining in the Bush-Cheney US invasion of Iraq based upon the lie that Iraq was constructing weapons of mass destruction—chemical and germ and even nuclear weapons.
Then too, more recently, Starmer before his election as PM in July 2024 was the British government’s head prosecutor, in which post he slavishly did the bidding of three US presidents — GW Bush, Barack Obama and Trump—in keeping journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in prison for over a decade in solitary confinement much of he time, and without any trial, much less conviction, while the US attempted to extradite him to face a treason charge.
The Starmer government’s legal attack on Palestine Action backfired spectacularly as elders, including people with canes, crutches and in wheelchairs, began attending huge protests in public spaces, including popular tourist sites. They all hand-written signs, most saying ,’“I oppose Genocide” and “I support Palestine Action!” The 2700 protesters arrested over several months, essentially begging by displaying those banned lines to be arrested, have been subsequently taken or wheeled into custody, sometimes in the hundreds at such actions over the last half year or so.
Often they found themselves being led to waiting vans by apologetic Metropolitan Police officers, who have had to endure being berated by shocked locals and by European and US tourists remarking, “I thought Britain had freedom of speech!”
This High Court ruling will be especially welcome to the 700 of those arrested sho were slapped with felony charges for “supporting a terrorist group.” A number of these people have been on a hunger strike, with some reportedly coming close to death as their cases made their slow way up through the lower courts. As their cases look likely to be tossed out, most have ended their protest fast.
Over six months after the case went to the High Court, a panel of three Judges issued their ruling: The application of the Terrorism Act to Palestine Action, which they found “does not advocate violence” or acts of violence against people, was being “illegally applied “to the group and to its protesting backers..
It was a sharp slap-down of the prime minister, who has been facing more than his share of disastrous cock-ups requiring a reversals of policy decisions, with many now predicting his early ouster as PM.
The High Court’s dramatic ruling wasn’t, for all that, a perfect win for free speech and the right to protest in the UK This is because, despite the High Court’s strong language in condemning the use of the Antiterrorism Law against Palestine Action, the judges, noting that there would likely be an appeal by the government to the Court of Appeal, the equivalent of the US Supreme Court, said they would leave the ban on the group ion place pending the appeal (though the Metro Police say they will no longer be arresting people for expressing support for Palestine Action or for calling out Israel genocide., Starmer and the Home Secretary Mahmood, have both stated they plan to appeal the ruling.
The interesting thing to me is that in Britain, its is the highest or penultimate court that acts boldly , or perhaps semi-boldly, in reversing decisions by the national government, while lower courts “kick the quid” upstairs to a higher court. Meanwhile, here in the US it is higher courts, the Appellate Circuit Court judges and the Supreme Court justices (who all have lifetime tenure and are likely at the pinnacle of their legal careers, not having to worry about being passed over for nomination to a higher judicial station), who are showing obscene fealty to wannabe tyrant Donald Trump, while hopes for holding the line on the destruction of liberty and democracy, lie with with the lower federal magistrates and judges, who also have lifetime tenure but have to worry that bold rulings that oppose Trump’s destructive executive orders and his cabinet secretaries’ actions shredding . . the Bill of Rights, could end their hopes of advancing to higher court appointments.
Logically, the UK situation makes more sense, but here in the US hoping for courage, principle and a lack of careerist concern in our lower courts is all we’ve got.
There’s also another thought: Perhaps it is the UK’s lack of a written Constitution, and the US’s venerated Torah-like written document that explain the difference in their approach to considering lower court decisions and government actions. . British jurists on the High Court look at the precedents of British Common Law and generally have a whole pallet of them go select from in coming to a ruling, In contrast, US Supreme Court Justices— particularly the “strict constructionist” jurists, all six of them Republican nominees to the bench, who spend their time parsing the exact meaning of the words in the text of the Constitution and its later Amendments in reaching their decisions from the bench, while the three liberals on the court, look at the context of when those words were written, and how circumstances may have changed. Consider for example the 15th Amendment on the right to vote, which states, in full: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
“Strict constructionists, one would think, would be hard-pressed to find a way around that declarative sentence to find a way to justify keeping non-whites from voting. Yet in the intervening decades since tha amendment was approved, these justices have found many ways, arguing for example that requiring proof of citizenship — a birth certificate, driver’s license or passport, for instance can be required since only citizens can vote.. But since many people have long ago lost their birth certificate, or, In the case of poor families and rural families where children were and sometimes still are born at home and their births remain unregistered, or some urban dwellers have never owned a car or needed a driver’s license, while many in the US have never traveled abroad and thus have no passport,.Doesn’t such a requirement constitute an “abridgment” of ther right to vote?
Source: Declassified UKThe first time I really knew about Palestine Action was in 2019, several months before their official launch, when I followed their co-founder Richard Barnard and other activists into the Instro Precision factory in Kent.
After dozens of staff had been escorted out, the factory, a subsidiary of Israeli weapons manufacture Elbit Systems, was closed and the building was graffitied. A very polite policeman asked the activists when they were intending to leave, reassuring them that they would not be arrested.
Sitting in front of the slogan “Elbit Murder Machine”, sprayed on the glass front of the building, Barnard asked how people could shut down a factory that was supposedly “law-abiding” and yet not be arrested. Around the same time, an Elbit factory in Oldham was closed by an occupation for two days, and again no one was charged.
In those days, activists facing trial could demand disclosure of weapons export licences and other information. The argument was that Elbit had to prove that the factory’s activities were lawful, before any disruption could be found to be unlawful. Possibly as a result, Elbit regularly backed away from pressing charges, even in cases of serious damage and major disruption. Back then, Elbit never responded to requests for comment.
New legal rulings, like then-attorney general Suella Braverman’s referral of the Colston Statue case to the Court of Appeal in 2022, have made it much harder for climate or arms-trade activists to defend themselves in court. Acts of criminal damage on private property now have no human rights protections, and arguing that action is necessary to prevent greater crimes – what’s called lawful excuse – is now rarely available as a valid legal defence anymore.
Co-founder Huda Ammori, who has just won her judicial review over Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action, told me that in the six years of the group’s direct action activities, even among those actually taken to trial, around half have been found not guilty, or the jury failed to reach unanimous verdicts. So even though it is getting more and more difficult to offer any sort of lawful defence, wins are still possible as the recent trial of the Filton 6 has shown.
The Trial
In August 2024, six members of Palestine Action broke into Elbit’s UK headquarters in Filton, near Bristol. They were arrested and denied bail, which meant they would be kept in prison until the case went to trial in November 2025.
Although initially held under counter-terrorism powers, they were only charged with lesser offences, ranging from criminal damage to more serious allegations of aggravated burglary, which potentially carries the penalty of life imprisonment.
I observed every day of the Filton trial, from jury selection on 17 November until verdicts on 4 February. The six defendants, all young people with no previous criminal convictions or cautions, and each with glowing character references, had already been imprisoned for 15 months. Since the proscription of Palestine Action (PA) last July, they reported even harsher treatment within the prison system.
Claims of extra time confined to cells, withholding of mail, and reduced contact and visits eventually led to hunger strikes by several other Filton defendants who face further long remand times until their trials are heard.
On trial days, defendants were routinely woken at 5am, normally missing breakfast while security checks were done. They were loaded onto the prison vans operated by Serco, the company which runs prison escorts and custody services, and could spend hours on a circuitous route to the court.
Although vegan prisoners might be given packed lunches by the prison, there is a Kafkaesque rule that prevents these being eaten at the court, and the Woolwich Crown Court kitchen often runs out or only has very limited and unhealthy vegan options.
At one point, the judge ordered that a banana be given to one of the defendants, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, before she gave evidence. It took 40 minutes to resolve the issue. Another day, the judge, Mr Justice Johnson, requested the same for another defendant, Zoe Rogers, when she was feeling faint while giving her evidence, but Serco staff said they had got into trouble before and they refused.
It’s worth noting that Serco reportedly went into partnership with Elbit Systems recently to bid for a UK armed forces training contract worth £2 billion, although it was subsequently awarded to Raytheon.
Tired, hungry defendants find it hard to follow complex legal arguments and prosecution evidence, and then have little time for consultation with their lawyers. Day after day, prisoners arrived too late at court to have any facetime with their legal representatives. At the end of the day, Serco insisted on vans leaving as soon as possible, although again it could be hours before a prisoner returned to their cell and hopefully received some food before bed.
The Elbit-sized elephant in the room
Throughout the first weeks of trial, defence lawyers repeatedly highlighted these issues of access, but Mr Justice Johnson, while expressing sympathy, cited case management and an urgent need to make progress as taking precedent.
The issue came to a head at the start of the defence evidence. While the jury were out, one of the defence barristers made a submission with reference to the case of R v Cordingley, in which a verdict was quashed on appeal on the basis it wasn’t a fair trial due to the behaviour of the trial judge. The barrister said that due process and the right to a fair trial must trump using every spare minute of court time.
Moreover, lead defence counsel Rajiv Menon KC consistently sought to pursue lines of questioning which brought the issues of Elbit and Gaza into the courtroom, pushing against procedural constraints placed in his path.
He revisited these issues in his closing speech to the jury, pointing out that while a judge is entitled to make rulings as to what areas of evidence are relevant and which are not, the result of that in this case had been that the jury heard very limited information about Elbit. No witness from Elbit took the stand, and the security guards themselves were employed by an outsourced company, Minerva Elite, founded by former UK Special Forces officers and personnel.
As Menon put it, “Elbit remains in the shadows, hidden and protected, but not, ladies and gentlemen, in the corridors of power, where no doubt they are welcomed, wined, and dined”.
The missing footage
Elbit was not even called to give evidence about their apparently unfit-for-purpose security surveillance system. Remember this is a high-tech company that provides sophisticated surveillance systems for border walls, but more than a year after the incident, it came to light during the trial that the map of CCTV cameras given to the defence team had several missing including those in areas of the factory where disputed incidents had taken place.
Testimony from police witnesses, and in particular the CCTV recovery officer working for the police’s National Digital Exploitation Service, revealed for the first time various issues with camera footage, none of which had been in her original written statement. In the afternoon at the start of the trial’s third week when the jury was not in the court, Menon said that the defence had been kept in the dark about these issues, and only by pressing harder during the trial had they finally been given unredacted body-worn footage including the moment security guard Angelo Volante entered the factory wielding a whip.
Another clip showing Volante moving towards someone while holding a sledgehammer triggered a wider request on 18 November, and the defence team were then drip fed around 300 pages of further evidence including email traffic between the police and an anonymised senior Elbit employee known as “Witness Alpha”.
On 2 December, defence barristers were cross-examining a police officer, PC Sarah Grant. Menon asked Grant if Elbit had sole control and access to the CCTV system for two days. She replied yes. He then quoted an email she had sent to “Witness Alpha” in which she wrote: “There’s a huge opportunity for the defence counsel to use the gaps and jumps to their advantage”. Menon then questioned why among the correspondence revealed in the hundreds of pages of new evidence, police appeared to be “chatting with Israel’s largest arms manufacturer about what the defence counsel might do”.
Corporate and state media coverage
On 25 November, on what would have been the first day of the PA judicial review hearing, prosecution evidence was given to the press. This comprised video footage of the incident, carefully edited over a period of months by the police’s Forensic Audio and Visual Unit (FAVU), under guidance from Detective Constable Matthew Hammersley, a counter-terrorism police officer.
The footage or stills were widely shared, alongside lurid headlines, only lightly sprinkled with the word “allegedly”, that described one of the defendants, Samuel Corner, “wearing a keffiyeh”, attacking a “screaming” police woman with a sledgehammer, and “breaking” her spine. Social media blew up, and it was a field day for the followers of pro-Israel accounts, who described the incident as attempted murder, proving that Palestine Action were terrorists, and calling for capital punishment. I sent a few screenshots of what I perceived to be clear examples of contempt of court to Mr Justice Johnson, and received a polite reply thanking me.
The media accounts quoted police and security guards, with no context or accurate reporting of the actual live evidence which included shifting accounts under cross-examination.
One example was PC Aaron Buxton, a police officer at the incident. In his witness statement, Buxton said he saw one of the defendants, Jordan Devlin, holding a sledgehammer. When shown footage, he admitted Devlin was unarmed, but that Volante was the one with the sledgehammer. The media was not told about the alleged two serious assaults by Volante against Devlin, we hadn’t seen the newly disclosed footage of him entering the building with whip in hand, and we hadn’t heard that a disorientated Samuel Corner had just been sprayed in his eyes with PAVA liquid, a prohibited substance used under licence by police which causes extreme pain and leaves people disoriented and unable to see clearly for several minutes.
The verdict and potential retrial
Despite all the above, a jury made up of twelve randomly-selected local residents eligible to vote could not convict a single person accused of these serious crimes. On 4 February, a clear ‘not guilty’ verdict was returned for all six on the charge of aggravated burglary. The jury was not satisfied that the protesters entered the Elbit factory carrying items with the intention to cause injury.
Three were also acquitted of violent disorder. The jury could not reach a verdict on the remaining three defendants on this particular charge, nor on any of the possible lesser offences they might have found Corner guilty of, not even on the basic charge of criminal damage.
Tomorrow the judge will hear submissions on whether and on what basis a retrial will go ahead. During the past week, press articles have suggested, without evidence, that the jury had been tampered with.
Among the many high-profile public reactions to the verdict, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch expressed her disgust that someone could “break the spine” of a police officer and “get away with it”, shadow home secretary Chris Philp wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) demanding a retrial. The Police Federation made public their letter to the DPP, and former government advisor Lord Walney also expressed his deep disappointment at the verdict.
Many other similar public observations led to a tsunami of outrage across social media, effectively damning the jury’s decision and dismissing the eight weeks of evidence they all sat through attentively. It is hard to see how such wide-scale commentary could not be prejudicial to a future retrial.
Samuel Corner remains on remand without bail in Belmarsh Prison despite no conviction, while the other five defendants have been released under very strict bail conditions. Their futures are all still on hold, while seemingly the state awaits the ‘right’ result.
