UK granted permission to appeal ruling that Palestine Action ban was unlawful
The British government has been given permission to appeal against a ruling that its ban on the pro-Palestinian campaign group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation was unlawful.
London’s High Court granted Britain’s Home Office permission to challenge its ruling, saying the ban would remain in place pending the appeal. The court had ruled this month that the ban was unlawful.
Palestine Action was proscribed in July after targeting Israel-linked defence companies in Britain, often blocking entrances or spraying red paint.
‘Anti-Palestinian repression’: Legal experts document hundreds of UK cases
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/25/anti-palestinian-repression-legal-experts-document-hundreds-of-uk-cases
Legal experts have documented almost 1,000 incidents in which pro-Palestine voices have been allegedly targeted in the United Kingdom, data that they say represents a “systematic effort” to repress the country’s solidarity movement.
The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) has verified 964 cases of “anti-Palestinian repression” from January 2019 until August 2025, including students being investigated over their solidarity, activists being arrested, employees facing disciplinary procedures and artists having their events cancelled.
The findings of the study, carried out in collaboration with researchers at Forensic Architecture, are a “sample indicative of a far wider and deeper pattern”, said the group comprising lawyers and legal officers.
The ELSC pitched the report as an Index of Repression, a database that is open to the public.
“We’re launching this database to show that repression of the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain is pervasive,” Amira Abdelhamid, ELSC’s director of research and monitoring, told Al Jazeera.
ELSC said “Zionist advocacy” groups, journalists and media outlets were involved in 138 incidents – including UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a pro-Israel organisation that it said played a part in 29 of the documented cases.
“The goal of this analysis is to denaturalise this politically produced process,” the group said. “This strategic targeting across sectors represents a kind of division of repressive labour. It aims to dismantle solidarity at every stage, from the formation of political consciousness in universities and schools, to its expression in culture, to its organisation in public spaces.”
“The main immediate goal of this anti-Palestinian repression is to depoliticise the movement, to make it seem as though it’s not a legitimate political and ethical struggle, but rather a security problem, a problem of so-called anti-Semitism or a breach of compliance,” ELSC’s Abdelhamid said.“I don’t think that has succeeded … two years on we still see people resisting the repression happening in Britain [and] speaking up and acting for Palestine and against the genocide.”
According to YouGov, one in three Britons have “no sympathy at all for the Israeli side in the conflict” after Israel killed more than 70,000 people in two years and decimated the Gaza Strip.
The government, led by Labour leader Keir Starmer, has long been accused of cracking down on pro-Palestine solidarity because of a wave of arrests during demonstrations and due to its proscription of Palestine Action as a “terror” organisation – a ruling recently deemed unlawful by the High Court.
In January, Human Rights Watch said that its research found a “disproportionate targeting of certain groups, including climate change activists and Palestine protesters, undermining the right to protest freely and without fear of harassment”.
