Palestine Action raises £100,000 to fight being proscribed
Palestine Action has raised more than £100,000 to fight the government's attempts to proscribe it as a terrorist organisation.
It has instructed Gareth Peirce, a veteran human rights solicitor who has represented Guantanamo Bay detainees Moazzam Begg and Shaker Aamer, the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, to represent the group in court.
As of yesterday evening, Palestine Action had raised £113,000 on the Crowd Justice website, which describes itself as the UK's leading fundraising platform for legal issues 'big and small'.
It is the platform that Palestine Action has frequently used to raise money for the legal costs for its activists facing court trials following its direct action protests.
The group believes it can block efforts by the government to add it to a list of proscribed terrorists organisations in the UK, which would make it illegal to be a member, invite support for or donate to Palestine Action — with a maximum punishment of 14 years in jail.
However, it said it was preparing to de-proscribe the group if the government succeeds. Only five groups have succeeded in being removed from the list of terror groups since the proscription process was set up 25 years ago. Hamas is currently fighting a legal battle to de-proscribe it from the Home Office list.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, will introduce secondary legislation to ban the group on Monday, followed by votes in the House of Commons on Wednesday and in the House of Lords on Thursday. If successful, Palestine Action will be banned by the end of next week, which would place the group alongside terrorist organisations including al-Qaeda, Isis and Hamas.
Cooper said she had decided to ban Palestine Action after a 'long history of unacceptable criminal damage' culminating in its 'disgraceful attack' at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire on Friday.
On its crowdfunding page, the group said it needed £100,000 to fund the legal fight, which it received within 48 hours of the home secretary's announcement.
It said: 'Whilst we hope to stop the proscription process, we need to also prepare for the potential fight to de-proscribe Palestine Action.'
Neil Basu, the former head of UK counter terrorism, has backed the government's attempts to proscribe Palestine Action. He suggested the government should also lower the bar for proscription, a process that takes months of legal preparation for the Home Office.
He told Global Player's Crime Agents podcast: 'This is a really difficult issue, and I think they [Palestine Action] may have done their own legs with the Brize Norton incursion. We all feel like we're on the edge of war, if not actually actively at war, in our support to Ukraine and what's happening in the Middle East with our most powerful ally, then you invade a military base, you are crossing a line there, there's no doubt about it.'
Basu cited previous moves to proscribe al-Muhajiroun, the Islamic extremists, and National Action, a far-right organisation, as examples of how it took years to proscribe them but they were suddenly disabled once they had been added to the list of banned terrorist groups because it allowed counterterrorism policing and the intelligence agencies to target them and 'break them'.
Making the case for lowering the bar for proscription, Basu said: 'Up until that point, they'd been a serious threat, so maybe the time is right to lower the bar, and we made mistakes in the past, and actually, it would be better to cut off a potentially extremist group before they've developed their reach and they've developed their narrative and they've developed the people they want to radicalise.'
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