https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2025/10/we-have-power-to-destroy-ban-on.html

We Have the Power to Destroy The Ban on Palestine Action and the State’s Conflation of Protest With Terrorism

Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign Have Refused to Mobilise Behind the Defend Our Juries campaign. Why?

October 4 Defend Our Juries Demonstration Against the Proscription of Palestine Action

Both Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign are doing their utmost to build the 31st (?) national demonstration this Saturday against Genocide in Gaza. These demonstrations are important morale boosters for activists yet in terms of their impact on the British Government they have been a failure. They also attract very little media attention.

Defend Our Juries protests by way of contrast have attracted massive media publicity and have put the Establishment on the backfoot. People like former Supreme Court Judge Jonathan Sumption have come out and said in the Independent of 12 August 2025:

The Terrorism Act creates an offence of supporting a proscribed organisation. It precisely defines what acts amount to support. One of them is wearing, carrying or displaying an article giving rise to a reasonable suspicion that the person supports the proscribed organisation. This is far too wide.

Merely indicating your support for a terrorist organisation without doing anything to assist or further its acts should not be a criminal offence and is consistent with basic rights to free speech. It looks as if Palestine Action has deliberately courted trouble by encouraging people to carry placards with messages specially designed to commit the offence. Martyrdom sometimes has a political value.



Even Murdoch’s Times opposed the proscription of Palestine Action in a leading article. Not from any sympathy for PA's 'squalid agenda' but because it might create the impression that pro-Palestinian sentiment was being censored, perish the thought!

As Paul Harris SC, the founding Chair of the Bar’s Human Rights Committee wrote:

there can be no doubt that a decision to proscribe a non-violent organisation articulating widely shared concerns is a dangerous attack on free speech and freedom to protest, which is likely to cause sustained injustice to peaceful supporters of that organisation or its aims, who will as a consequence be designated terrorist supporters.

Different police forces have reacted differently. Some like Devon and Cornwall have not arrested people with placards supporting Palestine Action. There has been widespread consternation, reaching into the higher echelons of the State about the overreach of the Terrorism Act and its effect on the right to protest. The intelligence document on which the government based its decision concluded that 99% of PA’s actions were not terrorist. Ctd....