Defend Our Juries has confirmed that 500+ people have committed to holding ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’ signs on Saturday 9 August in central London, as part of the Lift the Ban campaign to end the proscription of Palestine Action. The news comes as Yvette Cooper went in the corporate media to repeat her lies that Palestine Action are a ‘violent threat’ to the country.

Palestine Action: the outrage continues

The controversy over the government’s banning of Palestine Action as a terrorist group has continued unabated.

As the Canary previously reported, on Wednesday 30 July the High Court granted permission to Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, to bring a full judicial review against the order of Yvette Cooper, proscribing the group as a ‘terrorist organisation’.

Mr Justice Martin Chamberlain rejected the Home Secretary’s position stating that:

The proscription order is likely to give rise to interference with rights guaranteed by common law and Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights …

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 & 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 order to be determined authoritatively as soon as possible.

He granted Huda Ammori leave to bring a full judicial review. Despite this, Defend Our Juries has confirmed the protest on 9 August will go ahead – despite police threats to arrest hundreds of people.

Defend Our Juries previously said:

It would already be a huge and costly operation for the Met to arrest so many people for holding cardboard signs, peaceful people who are motivated by horror at the genocide in Gaza and a desire to uphold democratic freedoms. The prospect of the order being ruled unlawful opens up the further possibility that all those arrested and detained will later be awarded compensation payments for unlawful arrest.

Lie after lie from Yvette Cooper

Meanwhile, home secretary Yvette Cooper has defended her decision to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group. She told LBC on Tuesday 5 August:

The proscribing process is based on very extensive security advice and security assessments to me as home secretary, which I have to take immensely seriously. That security assessment looks at the violent attacks, injuries, attacks on national security infrastructure, and also includes assessment and some really troubling information that refers to future attack planning as well. That’s the basis on which this organisation has been proscribed.

And let’s be clear, this is a narrow organisation. This is not about protesting about Palestine, which huge numbers of people lawfully do.

I understand there are people who don’t really know the details of this organisation, who may be thinking about protesting, but who don’t know [the full details]. What I would say to them is more information is likely to be revealed about this organisation as various trials go through the legal system. And, really, this is not a non-violent organisation.

The problem is, we do know the full details – and Palestine Action is in no way a terror group; something the government has been told.

As the Canary previously reported, a damning Declassified UK report shows the Labour government’s own advisers told it Palestine Action didn’t pose a clear violent threat. Yet amid pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists, who have significant influence on Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, the state opted to ban the group anyway. This unprecedented crackdown came amid ongoing UK support for the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza.

Declassified‘s John McEvoy notes that “officials struggled to produce evidence the group posed a national security threat”. In particular, MI5’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) told the government “the majority of direct action by Palestine Action would not be classified as terrorism”. It also admitted that “PA branded media will highly unlikely explicitly advocate for violence against persons”.

The Proscription Review Group (PRG), meanwhile, admitted that it knew of no precedent for banning a non-violent direct action group on terror grounds. And both JTAC and the PRG told the government in March that only 3 out of 385 actions could possibly cross the threshold for banning Palestine Action.

Stop this nonsense

Yet still, Yvette Cooper trots out the line that Palestine Action is a violent threat.

So, Defend Our Juries will continue to protest, while Palestine Action awaits its judicial review. It remains to be seen how the government and Cooper can continue to maintain any legitimacy in the face of this nonsense.

Featured image via the Canary