2 hours ago
6
In June 2025, the UK government proscribed the UK-based group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000. This was not a security decision, but a political one, marking an unprecedented escalation in the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity in the United Kingdom. Palestine Action members have engaged in non-violent direct action aimed at disrupting the UK’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, targeting facilities linked to Israel’s arms industry operating in the UK, including Elbit Systems sites and elements of British military infrastructure.
Rather than confronting its own actions, the government has sought to divert attention from the central issue: the UK’s role in the Gaza genocide. Throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza, the UK has provided sustained political and diplomatic support, supplied vital components for F-35 fighter jets, and conducted R1 surveillance flights over Gaza. Taken together, these actions render the British government not merely complicit, but materially involved in the violence itself.
At the same time, the UK has sought to obstruct international accountability. It has attempted to interfere with proceedings at the International Criminal Court — conduct that may constitute an offence under Article 70(1) of the ICC Statute — by intimidating the ICC Prosecutor and creating procedural obstacles designed to delay or prevent the issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Rather than reassessing policies that expose it to legal and moral liability, the government has turned on those who insist on holding it to its own professed values — values it readily invokes when geopolitically convenient, such as in Ukraine and Greenland.
Anti-terror laws to justify political imprisonment
The persecution of individuals on political grounds through the law is by no means new. As early as 399 BCE, Socrates was tried and executed in Athens on charges of “impiety”, “not recognising the gods the state recognises”, and “corrupting the youth”, with the law itself serving as the instrument of repression.
Today, Russia’s crackdown on dissent, carried out through formally lawful means, stands as one of the most widely criticised contemporary examples of political imprisonment, routinely condemned by Western governments, including the UK.
Attempts to define and legally operationalise the concept of political imprisonment have long faced resistance. While there is no consensus on what constitutes a “political prisoner” or “prisoner of conscience”, the criteria established by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), of which the UK is a member, offer clear and authoritative guidance:
“a. if the detention has been imposed in violation of one of the fundamental guarantees set out in the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols (ECHR), in particular freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and association;
b. if the detention has been imposed for purely political reasons without connection to any offence;
c. if, for political motives, the length of the detention or its conditions are clearly out of proportion to the offence the person has been found guilty of or is suspected of;
d. if, for political motives, he or she is detained in a discriminatory manner as compared to other persons; or,
e. if the detention is the result of proceedings which were clearly unfair and this appears to be connected with political motives of the authorities.” (SG/Inf(2001)34, paragraph 10).
These criteria are directly relevant to the UK’s treatment of Palestine Action. The British government is complicit in Israel’s systematic unmaking of Palestine, including its illegal occupation, its system of apartheid, and its role in the Gaza genocide, and Palestine Action has directly challenged this complicity. Where public order and civil disobedience laws once failed to suppress this activism, the state escalated to the use of exceptional anti-terror legislation.
The government has since resorted to the Terrorism Act to preemptively criminalise activists and expose them to sentences of up to 14 years’ imprisonment, a level of punishment grossly disproportionate to non-violent direct action. This disproportionality and choice of legislation signal a political motive.
The application of the Terrorism Act 2000 to non-violent direct action strips activists of ordinary legal protections and subjects them to an exceptional penal regime, including extended pre-charge detention, heightened surveillance powers, restrictions on association and expression, and dramatically increased sentencing exposure. Such measures are ordinarily reserved for acts involving mass violence, not protest aimed at preventing harm.
Under the PACE criteria, detention may be considered political where punishment is clearly disproportionate or where legal proceedings are unfair and politically motivated. Here, non-violent activism is met with the prospect of lengthy imprisonment alongside reputational destruction through terrorist designation. This combination satisfies multiple indicators of political imprisonment, particularly criteria (c) and (e).
The use of anti-terror law in this context does not merely criminalise conduct; it redefines dissent itself as a security threat, preempting fair adjudication and conditioning the public to accept extraordinary punishment for ordinary political opposition.
The broader picture
In penology, a penal system may serve several recognised purposes, including just deserts and retribution, incapacitation, and deterrence. What is unfolding in the UK fits none of these aims. Instead, the penal system is being deployed to expand executive power and suppress political opposition, deviating from the purposes a penal system in a liberal democracy should serve.
The UK is complicit in grave violations of international law and has not only failed to meet its international legal obligations, but has actively breached them. Some British citizens, concerned with justice, international law, and human rights, have peacefully stepped in to challenge their government’s wrongdoing. The state’s response has been to criminalise dissent while presenting repression as democratic self-defence.
Let us be clear: proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is not an isolated act. It is part of the UK’s broader complicity in Israel’s oppression and genocide, and it functions domestically to silence those who seek to disrupt that complicity.
This is not the first attempt to rule by law in the UK to support Israel’s policies in Palestine. The introduction of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism was another such attempt to control and intimidate opposition through legal means. With the weaponisation of anti-terror laws, the UK government has taken a further step towards shrinking the space for dissent.
The exceptional selectivity of legal tools and the disproportionality of the chosen penal regime cannot be justified when measured against the conduct in question: non-violent activism aimed at compelling the government to halt violence and uphold the international legal obligations it claims to champion. Those participating in violence are branding the non-violent as terrorists.
Finally, it is striking that after all these decades, the UK continues to ignore its unique historical responsibility towards the Palestinians. The UK imposed its mandate over Palestine by force, governing the territory while systematically privileging colonial and settler interests, before abandoning its obligations and withdrawing unilaterally. This withdrawal was crucial to creating the conditions in which the Nakba unfolded, in breach of the responsibilities the UK had assumed under the Mandate.
Among those obligations was the commitment articulated in the White Paper of 1939 to establish a Palestinian state for all its citizens within 10 years, a promise that was never honoured. The UK planted the seeds of Palestinian suffering and then exited Palestine without securing political self-determination for its indigenous people, leaving a legacy of dispossession that continues to shape the present.
More than a century after the Mandate, it remains Palestinians — supported by allies across the world — who are risking everything to defend the values of humanity and the principles of international law. The British state, by contrast, has chosen evasion over responsibility, and repression over reckoning.
Any hopes?
Hope lies in refusing the normalisation of this moment. By challenging the proscription of Palestine Action, activists are not only resisting the UK’s complicity in Israel’s crimes, but defending the space for dissent itself. The struggle is not simply to reverse one decision, but to prevent the erosion of democratic limits through the misuse of law. In the UK right now, defending democracy and acting against complicity in Israeli atrocities go hand in hand.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
