Two tier arrests at Supreme Court Palestine Action hearing

Police arrest nearly thirty despite an intervention by Green Party peer Jenny Jones

Green Party member of the House of Lords Jenny Jones attended a small peaceful protest outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday. She addressed police, telling them that she hoped they would not go ahead and make any “mistaken” arrests.

Despite her intervention, nearly thirty people were arrested under terrorism legislation (section 12) for simply displaying banners with individual variations of wording which had previously been published on social media platform X by the author Sarah Helm. She is the wife of the government National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell.

Book publisher Faber had announced they would stop selling Irish author Sally Rooney’s books in the UK, for fear her royalties would be donated to the proscribed group Palestine Action (although there is currently no such group to donate to, due to Yvette Cooper’s controversial proscription – the subject of the current Supreme Court appeal). Following Faber’s decision, Sky News broadcaster Adam Boulton published a comment in which he accused Rooney of an “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish” stance.

In defence of her fellow author, Sarah Helm responded with the post “God Help Us Authors Who Support Palestine And Palestine Action. Sounds like Adam would have all our books swept off the shelves in a jiffy”.

Pressure from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism led to a police investigation by a specialist team at the Metropolitan Police – they decided that the wording “did not meet the criminal threshold”.

Protestors outside the Court on Wednesday held banners with personalised variations on Helm’s words, simply changing the word ‘authors’ as appropriate, to ‘gardeners’, ‘child psychologists’, ‘teachers’, ‘Jews’ and so on, but despite Jenny Jones’ pleas, police went ahead with the terrorism arrests.

Later the same day, Scottish officers took a different view at a similar protest in Edinburgh, allowing it to take place with no arrests, once again highlighting the difficulty of even knowing how this most serious of laws will be applied in any single case.

Even if criminal cases are not pursued, the police action clearly interfered with the right to peaceful protest outside the Supreme Court at that important time, and it follows a pattern of increasing repression against not only citizens protesting against the decision to proscribe Palestine Action, but more generally against support for Palestine itself.

At the protest Real Media spoke to a child psychologist, moved to protest after seeing a research report by Save The Children claiming that Israeli police had sexually abused half of the Palestinian children they detained. Due to her ‘terrorism’ arrest while holding a banner, she has now been denied cover by her professional insurer and can no longer work. Many protesters are in similar limbo, while the justice system waits for the legal process to decide whether any of these arrests are even valid, pending a final decision on the original proscription.

The Metropolitan Police have made several public statements complaining that Defend Our Juries protests have taken up a huge amount of police time and resources, but observers claim the wholly peaceful events have been massively over-policed (while other forces around the country and in Scotland have on occasion simply ignored them).

A teacher told us her home had been raided by eight counter-terrorism officers and she’d been taken to the special counter-terrorism suite at Hammersmith – this was all for posting a protest video in which she said she supported Palestine Action – she has not been connected in any way with a direct action let alone terrorist incident.

Endless stories of this sort suggest there is a massive amount of resource being allocated in the political repression of any criticism of the ongoing Genocide carried out by the UK’s ally in the Middle East.

The court hearing ended yesterday afternoon with a closed session at which the Government representatives presented ‘secret’ evidence which neither Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori nor her lawyers were allowed to hear.

For a day and a half before that, the five men on the Supreme Court panel heard evidence relating to the single ground on which Ammori’s appeal was permitted – whether the ban was compatible with the freedom of expression and assembly.

Her lawyer Raza Hussain KC argued that the proscription was a “colossal invasion” of ECHR rights. The government had considered three actions that they had defined (under broad terms) as terrorism, but this represents less than 1% of the group’s near 400 protest actions. Mr Hussain argued that the group’s campaign was part of a British tradition of direct action, from suffragettes, through anti-war movements, to animal rights and environmental groups, motivated by conscience. Many of these groups used more extreme tactics than Palestine Action, and despite the High Court’s claim that the suffragettes were pacifists, they’d actually resorted to arson, fire-bombing and serious property damage, without ever being labelled as terrorists, and for which they have been “proven right by history”.

Apart from considering arguments from the government and from Ammori, the court accepted interventions from a number of parties. These included the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism, Amnesty International and Liberty, all expressing deep concern over the proscription. One new argument was that if the European Court later deems that the thousands of arrests that have taken place for “supporting” Palestine Action were a breach of rights and quashed, this would leave the UK’s Terrorism laws in disarray.

Other interveners included the Community Security Trust and the Board of Deputies, claiming that Palestine Action was escalating and broadening its targets to terrorise Jewish people by attacking “Jewish-linked” businesses. This was countered by an intervention by a broad range of anti-Zionist Jewish groups, ‘the Jewish Bloc’, which illustrated the direct links between businesses targeted and the flow of weapons to Israel and claimed that the CST and Deputies were not true representatives of Jews in the UK.

The government’s lawyer, Sir James Eadie KC, described Palestine Action as the ‘antithesis of civil disobedience groups’ and pointed at their secretive ‘cell structure’ as well as arguing that they were violent, citing the Filton case (despite the jury deciding there was ‘no intent’ over the assault of a police officer there) and the Thales case, where the allegation is that fireworks were fired at employees.

He also weighed heavily into the constitutional and democratic right of the Home Secretary to make her decision without judicial interference.

Observers have commented that the judge’s panel appeared combative towards Ammori’s lawyers, interrupting them with questions and clarifications nearly a hundred and fifty times, while allowing Eadie to develop his arguments with very few interventions. Former British diplomat Craig Murray reported one of the judges as claiming the thousands of supporting protesters were themselves terrorists for trying “to overwhelm the justice system”.

The court has reserved judgement, so we could wait weeks or months for their decision, but the general feeling amongst those who witnessed proceedings is that it is likely to favour the continued proscription, and then the only step remaining will be taking the case to the European Court, leaving thousands of lives in a further legal limbo.