Palestine Action can proceed with a legal challenge against the Government over the group’s ban as a terror organisation, the Court of Appeal has ruled, as it dismissed a Home Office appeal.
Huda Ammori took taking legal action against former home secretary Yvette Cooper’s decision to proscribe the group under anti-terror laws.
The ban, which began on July 5, made membership of, or support for, the direct action group a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Mr Justice Chamberlain later cleared Ms Ammori to proceed with a challenge over the ban after finding that two arguments put forward on her behalf were “reasonably arguable”.
In September, the Home Office brought a challenge against this decision to the Court of Appeal in London.
In a summary of the Court of Appeal’s decision dismissing the Home Office’s appeal, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr said: “An application to deproscribe, with right of appeal to POAC (the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission) was not intended to be a means of challenging the initial decision.”
She added: “Judicial review would be a quicker means of challenging the order proscribing Palestine Action than applying to deproscribe.
“Judicial review would enable the High Court to give an authoritative judgment on whether or not it was lawful to proscribe Palestine Action.
“That judgment could then be relied on in criminal courts hearing charges against any person arrested in connection with their support of Palestine Action.”
At a hearing last month, barristers for the Home Office said Ms Ammori could bring her legal challenge to the Home Secretary and then the POAC, rather than the High Court for a “judicial review”.
Lawyers for Ms Ammori said the POAC was not the only suitable place to challenge the lawfulness of a ban.
More than 2,000 people have been arrested since Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation, according to campaign group Defend Our Juries.
Following the judges’ ruling, Ms Ammori, said: “The Court of Appeal has rightly rejected Yvette Cooper’s attempt to block a legal review of her absurdly authoritarian ban — while granting us additional grounds on which to challenge it.
“This is a landmark victory: not only against one of the most extreme attacks on civil liberties in recent British history, but for the fundamental principle that Government ministers can and must be held accountable when they act unlawfully.”
In a 37-page judgment, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, sitting with Lord Justice Edis and Lord Justice Lewis, said the process of applying for deproscription and appealing against a refusal at POAC “is intended to deal with another situation”.
Baroness Carr said the process “is not intended to be a means of challenging the initial decision to proscribe and does not provide for the removal of the consequences of an initial decision to proscribe an organisation”.
She added: “We consider that the fact that judicial review would be a more expeditious means of challenging the order, given the public importance of the issues raised, and, in particular, the fact that persons were facing convictions for acting in ways made criminal as a consequence of the order, justified using judicial review rather than the process of applying for an order to remove Palestine Action from the list of proscribed organisations.”
