Palestine Action High Court challenge can go ahead, judge rules
The ban means that membership of, or support for, the direct action group is a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Earlier this month, lawyers for Ms Ammori asked a judge to allow her to bring the High Court challenge over the ban, describing it as an 'unlawful interference' with freedom of expression.
And in a decision on Wednesday, judge Mr Justice Chamberlain said that two parts of the arguments on Ms Ammori's behalf were 'reasonably arguable' and would be heard at a three-day hearing in November.
However, he later refused a bid to temporarily pause the ban on the direct action group until the outcome of the challenge.
In his first ruling, he said it was arguable that the proscription 'amounts to a disproportionate interference' of Ms Ammori's rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.
He said: 'That being so, the point will have to be determined at a substantive hearing and it would not be appropriate for me to say more now.'
The judge continued that a second argument, that Ms Cooper failed to consult Palestine Action 'in breach of natural justice', could also go to a full hearing.
He said: 'As a matter of principle, I consider that it is reasonably arguable that a duty to consult arose.'
He continued: 'Having considered the evidence, I also consider it reasonably arguable that there was no compelling reason why consultation could not have been undertaken here.'
Mr Justice Chamberlain refused to allow Ms Ammori to challenge the Government's decision on several other grounds, including a claim that the Home Secretary failed to gather sufficient information on Palestine Action's activities or the impact of the proscription on people associated with it.
He also refused the request for a temporary block, finding there was a 'powerful public interest' in the ban continuing and there was not a 'material change of circumstance' since a previous hearing.
Following the first ruling, Ms Ammori said: 'This landmark decision to grant a judicial review which could see the Home Secretary's unlawful decision to ban Palestine Action quashed, demonstrates the significance of this case for freedoms of speech, expression and assembly and rights to natural justice in our country and the rule of law itself.'
She continued: 'We will not stop defending fundamental rights to free speech and expression in our country and supporting Palestinian people against a genocide being livestreamed before our eyes.'
Raza Husain KC, for Ms Ammori, previously told the court at the hearing on July 21 that the ban had made the UK 'an international outlier' and was 'repugnant'.
Mr Husain added: 'The decision to proscribe Palestine Action had the hallmarks of an authoritarian and blatant abuse of power.'
The Home Office is defending the legal action.
Sir James Eadie KC, for the department, said in written submissions that by causing serious damage to property, Palestine Action was 'squarely' within part of the terrorism laws used in proscription.
Previously, Ben Watson KC, also for the Home Office, said Palestine Action could challenge the Home Secretary's decision at the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC), a specialist tribunal, rather than at the High Court.
Sir James said that an 'exceptional case' would be needed for it to go to the High Court, rather than the POAC.
Mr Justice Chamberlain said on Wednesday that a High Court challenge could take place in the autumn of this year, whereas an appeal to the specialist tribunal would take much longer.
He said in a summary of his ruling: 'If it were necessary to appeal for deproscription, it is very unlikely that an application before POAC would be listed before the middle of 2026.'
In his 18-page written judgment, Mr Justice Chamberlain said: 'If the legality of the proscription order can properly be raised by way of defence to criminal proceedings, that would open up the spectre of different and possibly conflicting decisions on that issue in magistrates' courts across England and Wales or before different judges or juries in the Crown Court.
'That would be a recipe for chaos.
'To avoid it, there is a strong public interest in allowing the legality of the order to be determined authoritatively as soon as possible. The obvious way to do that is in judicial review proceedings.'
The judge also said that people protesting in support of Palestine and Gaza, but not expressing support for Palestine Action, had 'attracted various kinds of police attention, from questioning to arrest'.
He continued that it was 'important not to draw too much from the fact that police and others appear to have misunderstood the law on some occasions'.
But he added: 'Nonetheless, reports of the kind of police conduct referred to… are liable to have a chilling effect on those wishing to express legitimate political views.
'This effect can properly be regarded as an indirect consequence of the proscription order.'
Ms Cooper announced plans to proscribe Palestine Action on June 23, saying that the vandalism of the two planes, which police said caused an estimated £7 million of damage, was 'disgraceful'.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Report: Brit spy planes still flying over Gaza to help Israel find hostages
The RAF is continuing to fly spy planes over Gaza to help Israel 's government find the still-missing hostages taken by Hamas . According to sources who spoke to the Times, RAF aircraft launched from British air bases in the Middle East are being used to gather intelligence on the movement of those captured by Hamas on October 7 2023, and passed onto the IDF. Since the war between Hamas and Israel began, Britain has sent specialised aircraft to help Israel. Shadow R1s, specialist surveillance planes equipped with sophisticated espionage technology, have been flown almost everyday over the enclave. While the MoD refuses to disclose which aircraft are being used for these missions, flight tracking data shows the Shadow R1s have flown hundred of missions, as recently as last month, after taking off from Cyprus' RAF Akrotiri. The Ministry of Defence told the newspaper that these flybys are only done to collect information on the hostages. But questions have been raised over whether the missions are purely for finding the hostages. Former Major General Charlie Herbert told the newspaper: 'It's all good and proper saying they are handing over intelligence for the purposes for locating hostages, but in reality that intelligence is just as likely to be used as targeting for Hamas and others.' The confirmation of the missions comes despite relations between Britain and Israel being at an all-time low, following Prime Minister Keir Starmer's conditional pledge to recognise the state of Palestine, along with senior British government figures condemning Israel's actions in Gaza. Foreign Secretary David Lammy previously said he was 'appalled, sickened' by the 'grotesque' targeting of Palestinians seeking food by the IDF, and has threatened further sanctions. The UK government has invoked the ire of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who claimed the UK was 'rewarding Hamas' by conditionally pledging to recognise Palestine as a state . Earlier today Netanyahu reportedly told the military to prepare for a full takeover of the Gaza Strip, including areas where hostages are being held. A source in the Prime Minister's Office told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that the message had been passed on to IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir saying: 'If this does not suit you, then you should resign.' It comes as Netanyahu prepares to meet with top officials to decide on the next steps in Gaza and what to do about the remaining hostages. An Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post: 'The prime minister is considering all available options regarding the next steps.' According to reports, the prime minister used the phrase 'occupation of the Strip' in private conversations while describing his intentions for Gaza. If Netanyahu's plans are successful, the Israeli military could extend its reach across the whole region, according to local reports. It currently holds 75 percent of the Strip. He is now set to take the plans to his cabinet to seek their backing for the plan. In a video message, Netanyahu said he was 'committing to free Gaza from the tyranny of these terrorists'. According to The Times of Israel, the IDF is against the proposal and has said it would take a significant amount of time to clear infrastructure belonging to Hamas.
Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
Our complicit elite is to blame for every sexual assault by an illegal migrant
I was having coffee in the garden with John, the lovely man who comes to help me with all the jobs I can't manage (a temperamental pond pump and rampant blanket weed among them), when conversation turned to John's concern for his daughter. Kirstie's journey to college takes her past a former RAF base now occupied by illegal migrants who crossed the Channel in small boats. Their ranks have swollen recently to several hundred as the Government struggles to fulfil its promise to empty asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament. Not by deporting the legions of undocumented young males from Africa and the Middle East – of course not, silly! – but by secretly redistributing a majority of those migrants from hotels into HMOs (houses in multiple occupation) and military facilities, presumably in the hope that the public will be less likely to notice and kick off. But girls like Kirstie cannot fail to notice. Not when the foreign males who leer and hiss at them, as if they were living in Egypt not Essex, now outnumber the population of their village. Not when it is girls who were born here who are advised to change their behaviour to accommodate the culture of the new arrivals by being less provocative, and walking a different way to school. Lately John, like a lot of fathers I suspect, has started fearing the worst. 'We were talking in the pub the other night and we decided that, in the end, it's men like us who will have to go down and defend our southern border,' he said to me that day in the garden. The bees went about their buzzy business in the hollyhocks, there was a gentle trickle of water in the pond, its pump just mended by this good and reliable man. It was a quintessential English summer's day, temperate and benign as the people of these islands tend to be until roused, yet there we were, drinking our coffee and picturing thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Johns, the backbone of our country, the sturdy yeomen who have always come to the rescue in centuries past, marching to the beaches of Kent to protect us against invasion. To protect their women and children. That may sound alarmist, apocalyptic even, but is it really? When men like John are discussing in Wetherspoons what normal people can clearly see is a national emergency, no online Starmer-Stasi snoopers can stop them much, though a panic-stricken, authoritarian government would like to shut down free speech. Things that we would once have thought unimaginable, indeed completely bonkers, now feel like weekly, almost hourly, occurrences. Over 25,000 migrants, mostly young males, have already broken into Britain this year (49 per cent more than at the same point last year), and the nation that launched the D-Day landings against a mighty foe is now reliant on a spell of bad weather to keep the numbers down. Or on the latest doomed government 'one-in-one-out' scheme, beginning today, in which France generously allows herself to be bribed at British taxpayers' expense to take back maybe one of the 700 migrants who make the crossing in a single day, only to send the UK a substitute asylum seeker. Probably not a brain surgeon, to take a wild guess. Not only will such a tiny chance of being deported fail to act as a deterrent, it allows Labour to slyly open up a legal route into the UK while pretending it's a benefit to us. What would those who gave their lives in 1944 think of us – from Operation Overlord to Operation Over-Run in 80 years? Since the 2015-2016 New Years's Eve celebrations in Cologne, when around 1,200 women were raped or sexually assaulted by gangs of foreign men, I have warned repeatedly of the consequences of admitting young males from backward, misogynist cultures into a liberal, Western society. Naturally, telling the truth got me called 'racist' and I earned a coveted place on an Islamophobia list. But the pretence that a farmer from Afghanistan suddenly turns into Hugh Grant the minute his trainers hit the shingle at Dover was always a progressive fantasy. Sex-starved lads raised to regard women as livestock (Afghan women are no longer allowed to speak outside the home let alone go to school) are poor candidates for integration. They were always going to take gross liberties with our liberty. And so here we are. In leafy Nuneaton, a 12-year-old girl was allegedly raped by two Afghan asylum seekers. Despite Warwickshire Police's best (make that worst) attempts to conceal their identity, Ahmad Mulakhil, 23, was charged last week with rape, while Mohammad Kabir, 23, was charged with kidnap, strangulation and aiding and abetting rape. The police explained they did not wish to reveal the suspects' immigration status for fear of exacerbating our old friend 'community tensions'. In this case, community tensions is code for furious parents who strangely don't want their daughters abducted, their innocence torn from them by barbarians who shouldn't be here in the first place. In another incident on July 13, a Sudanese man who was living in a three-star asylum hotel in the upmarket Cheshire suburb of Wilmslow allegedly tried to lure away a girl aged 10 while she was with her father. Epping, meanwhile, has seen fierce protests after an Ethiopian, who had only come ashore eight days earlier and was being put up at the Bell Hotel, was charged with the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl. These alleged attacks are not an aberration; they are exactly what you would expect if you were to drop a gang of marauding vikings into a high-school prom at an all-girls' school. That has, effectively, been the policy of successive British governments. Our political class prefers to burnish their reputation among 'our international partners' by remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), making deportations almost impossible, while young girls – catcalled, groped, raped, strangled, abducted – are just thought of as unfortunate collateral damage. If they think about them at all. When it was disclosed recently that a superinjunction had been taken out by the last Conservative government to cover up importing thousands of Afghans into the UK, following a leak of names, I was berated on X by former defence minister Ben Wallace for daring to suggest that that underhand humanitarian mission could raise the level of risk for British women and girls. Mr Wallace thought the noble purpose of extricating men who may (or may not) have aided our armed forces was what mattered. I disagreed, foreseeing ever more rapes and cultural disintegration. A fate also predicted with some urgency, I notice, by US vice president JD Vance who last week accused Europe of 'engaging in civilisational suicide'. Coincidentally, a reader in Wiltshire got in touch to report how all those Afghans resettled in a local army camp are getting on. 'It's horrific, Allison,' she said. 'The behaviour of the Afghans in Larkhill – loitering around children's playgrounds, lads 'messing' with girls on school buses, human faeces regularly found on dog walks in camp. The GP practice is closed to soldiers one day a week to allow the migrants exclusive access. The reception staff have been handed crib sheets on how to greet Afghans in their own language. They are incensed. 'Why aren't the immigrants given crib sheets on how to address us in our own language?' ' My source says the Afghan families have been allocated most of the large houses, while soldiers who are entitled to bigger quarters are told 'there isn't a three-bed house in the whole of Wiltshire'. It's no surprise to learn that 'resentment is massive. The Afghans get free food – the truck goes round at least twice a day. 'If you drive through the camp you'd think you were in Kabul – groups of several men walking ahead of the women all covered in head-to-toe niqabs. Since the news of the superinjunction broke, they've been put under curfew. All the lads were warned that if they spoke out they'd be put on a charge.' See how the state acts to cover up its crimes against the British people. Whether it's silencing squaddies deprived of their rightful quarters or threatening with arrest those marvellous mums and grandmothers in raucously defiant pink who performed the Hokey-Cokey before staging a sit-in outside the Britannia Hotel asylum centre in Canary Wharf. It is politicians and senior civil servants who should be arrested, I reckon. They waste stupefying amounts of our money on people unlikely to ever make a net contribution to Britain and call it compassion. For whom? The National Audit Office has just predicted that, within 10 years, the cost of asylum accommodation will reach £15.3bn. It is intolerable. Imagine all the good such a sum could do to help struggling businesses and boost employment for our young people. Even when the popular sense of anger is palpable, as it is right now, the ability of our ruling class and much of the media to deny any adverse consequences of immigration is astonishing. I listened with mounting anger to Radio 4's PM programme on Monday (Sorry, mea culpa. I know you've told me to ditch the BBC!) where a reporter was trying to discredit data which showed that 40 per cent of sexual crimes in London were committed by foreign nationals. That, he explained, was only because migrants tend to be younger, and young men are most likely to commit those offences. I'm sure that will be a huge comfort to the traumatised women. All credit to Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick for causing consternation among the Open Borders fanatics by making the link between out-of-control migration and soaring rape figures. Compare the response of our woefully weak Prime Minister who wants to 'put pressure' on police chiefs to be 'as transparent as possible' about the ethnic background and immigration status of those charged with crimes such as rape and sexual assault. Even though it is the Crown Prosecution Service, which Sir Keir Starmer once ran, that refuses to keep track of the number of sexual offences by asylum seekers. We know why, don't we? Government sources said they hoped greater transparency would 'help rebuild the public trust'. As if. That's the same government which is mounting unprecedented and sinister surveillance to keep track of 'anti-migrant' opinion. Fifty million people will shortly be helping the police with their enquiries. 'If you come here illegally on a small boat you will face return,' Sir Keir Starmer warbled at migrants yesterday. Not, 'You will be deported immediately' but 'you will face return.' Or, let's face it and far more likely, 'You will be handed a free phone and free accommodation which we will pinch from a soldier's family if we have to.' Compare with Greece, which has set up secure camps to detain all illegal migrants for three months, all of them denied the ability to claim asylum. Emergency legislation is allowing Greeks to circumvent the ECHR. Denmark, another ECHR member, has practically closed the borders and is using gated detention camps, some housing up to 2,000 migrants who are allowed out for just two hours a day and cannot work. If a government wants to put its citizens first, it can. Ours doesn't. From now on, I suggest we put the blame for every rape, abduction and strangling by an illegal migrant squarely where it belongs – on the Government, Home Office civil servants and complicit media class. We don't want a one-in-one-out scheme, thanks all the same. We want a 50,000-in-50,000-out scheme. We want Kirstie and every girl like her to be able to walk unmolested to school, not to be hissed at by men who lack all respect for our values and our women. If our leaders are too weak to act, lovely John and the yeomen of Britain will go to the border, and they will do what needs to be done.
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
British spy planes 'are still flying over Gaza to help Israel find missing hostages'
The RAF is continuing to fly spy planes over Gaza to help Israel 's government find the still-missing hostages taken by Hamas. According to sources who spoke to the Times, RAF aircraft launched from British air bases in the Middle East are being used to gather intelligence on the movement of those captured by Hamas on October 7 2023, and passed onto the IDF. Since the war between Hamas and Israel began, Britain has sent specialised aircraft to help Israel. Shadow R1s, specialist surveillance planes equipped with sophisticated espionage technology, have been flown almost everyday over the enclave. While the MoD refuses to disclose which aircraft are being used for these missions, flight tracking data shows the Shadow R1s have flown hundred of missions, as recently as last month, after taking off from Cyprus' RAF Akrotiri. The Ministry of Defence told the newspaper that these flybys are only done to collect information on the hostages. But questions have been raised over whether the missions are purely for finding the hostages. Former Major General Charlie Herbert told the newspaper: 'It's all good and proper saying they are handing over intelligence for the purposes for locating hostages, but in reality that intelligence is just as likely to be used as targeting for Hamas and others.' The confirmation of the missions comes despite relations between Britain and Israel being at an all-time low, following Prime Minister Keir Starmer's conditional pledge to recognise the state of Palestine, along with senior British government figures condemning Israel's actions in Gaza. Foreign Secretary David Lammy previously said he was 'appalled, sickened' by the 'grotesque' targeting of Palestinians seeking food by the IDF, and has threatened further sanctions. The UK government has invoked the ire of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who claimed the UK was 'rewarding Hamas' by conditionally pledging to recognise Palestine as a state. Earlier today Netanyahu reportedly told the military to prepare for a full takeover of the Gaza Strip, including areas where hostages are being held. A source in the Prime Minister's Office told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that the message had been passed on to IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir saying: 'If this does not suit you, then you should resign.' It comes as Netanyahu prepares to meet with top officials to decide on the next steps in Gaza and what to do about the remaining hostages. An Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post: 'The prime minister is considering all available options regarding the next steps.' According to reports, the prime minister used the phrase 'occupation of the Strip' in private conversations while describing his intentions for Gaza. Netanyahu is now preparing to meet with top officials to decide on the next steps in Gaza and what to do about the remaining hostages If Netanyahu's plans are successful, the Israeli military could extend its reach across the whole region, according to local reports. It currently holds 75 percent of the Strip. He is now set to take the plans to his cabinet to seek their backing for the plan. In a video message, Netanyahu said he was 'committing to free Gaza from the tyranny of these terrorists'. According to The Times of Israel, the IDF is against the proposal and has said it would take a significant amount of time to clear infrastructure belonging to Hamas.
