UK High Court grants Palestine Action urgent hearing to challenge ban
Palestine Action is seeking to challenge the UK government’s bid to ban the group after the High Court granted them an urgent hearing to consider a judicial review of the decision.
In a hearing on Monday at the Royal Courts of Justice, Justice Chamberlain granted the group's co-founder Huda Ammori the opportunity to apply for "interim relief", which would effectively suspend the order pending the outcome of the hearings regarding the legal challenge.
Otherwise, the ban could come into force as soon as Friday - with Britain's Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's set to lay the draft order before parliament on Monday, and voting to be held on Wednesday.
If the decision to proscribe the activist group is passed by parliament, the move will designate them a terrorist organisation, making membership and support illegal.
The government's announcement came after activists broke into a RAF Brize Norton airbase on scooters and sprayed war planes with red paint on 20 June.
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The ban would mark the first time a direct action group has faced proscription, placing them alongside groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) and al-Qaeda under British law.
Cooper's order, which was published on Monday, seeks to ban the group alongside neo-Nazi groups Maniacs Murder Cult, which has been accused by the US of “planning and soliciting a mass casualty attack” in New York, and the Russian Imperial Movement, which Washington says has “provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe”.
In a statement, Palestine Action said that Cooper's move to ask MPs to vote on the proscription of all three groups on Wednesday "further highlights how unjustified and preposterous the Home Secretary’s proposed proscription of Palestine Action is".
"These foreign organisations are the kind of groups proscription was created to target - not protesters who disrupt arms factories and spray paint on war planes to protest war crimes and genocide," it said. On Friday, the group explained that the airbase was targeted because flights leave daily from there "for RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, a base used for military operations in Gaza and across the Middle East".
The statement added that the move will give parliamentarians "just minutes to consider each case".
'Irreparable harm'
Lawyers representing Ammori argued in their submission that Palestine Action’s proscription will inflict "irreparable harm” on the claimant, but also on the group’s many supporters, who will be stripped of "means of seeking relief against unlawful executive decision-making”.
They added that the speed with which the order has been pushed through risks a breach of natural justice and procedural fairness as well as the right of access to court under Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
The lawyers also noted “a failure of the duty to inform the Claimant of the basis on which it is proposed to restrict her rights through proscription” and to “afford her the opportunity to make representations before any decision to restrict her rights”.
Rights groups, including Amnesty International and the British NGO Liberty, have submitted supporting statements raising concerns about the broad implications of the group's proscription on fundamental rights to freedom of speech and to protest.
In a statement, Ammori said the court’s decision to grant an urgent hearing highlighted “the vital importance of what is at stake in this case, including the far-reaching implications any proscription of Palestine Action would have on fundamental freedoms of speech, expression and assembly in Britain”.
“I have been left with no choice but to request this urgent hearing and to seek either an injunction or other form of interim relief because of the home secretary’s decision to try to steamroll this through parliament immediately, without proper opportunity for MPs and peers to debate and scrutinise the proposal,” she said.
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