Today, three groups announced a co-ordinated campaign against the government’s use of terrorism legislation to stifle dissent over Israel’s actions in Gaza. The actions are designed to put pressure on the Home Secretary ahead of a Judicial Review of Yvette Cooper’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action, and to highlight the repressive treatment and potentially prejudiced trial of the so-called Filton 6.
Lift The Ban
In a press conference this morning Defend Our Juries spokesperson Dr Clive Dolphin announced that there will be a series of Lift The Ban protests across at least 18 cities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in the week leading up to and during the three days of the High Court judicial review which begins 25th November. He said that more than 1500 people have already joined online calls, but with 3 weeks until the first protest, more are joining up every day. This marks a major escalation of the campaign and poses a further dilemma to government and police.
He highlighted the different police responses so far to the ‘Lift The Ban’ protests, where citizens peacefully show defiance [breaching Sect. 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000] by writing and holding banners with the words “I Oppose Genocide – I Support Palestine Action”. Police Scotland chose to ensure public safety, with no arrests on the day, but some people were summoned later on, while London’s Metropolitan Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley tried to arrest as many as possible, sparing no public money, calling in officers from all over the country even as far as Northern Ireland.
The Commissioner’s hugely expensive deployments have resulted in the arrest of more than 2000 people to date, many of them pensioners, with charges laid against just a hundred or so, and the realisation that court regulations will need to be amended. Westminster is currently the only magistrates court authorised to hold terrorist trials, and so faces an unsustainable torrent of potential cases.
Hunger Strikes
At the same press briefing, Prisoners for Palestine spokesperson Francesca Nadin provided more details of the planned hunger strike and its aims. In order to protect prisoners who have already faced serious discrimination and repression, exact details and start dates are withheld but the first will begin on Balfour Day 2nd November.
Their demands, set out in a letter to the Home Secretary, are fivefold:
- Stop the repressive censorship of prisoners’ mail. (Books and letters have gone missing, visitor rights have been withdrawn, non-association orders have been applied, and there are claims of days of solitary confinement with no bedding or toothbrush, along with Islamophobic mistreatment including removal of hijabs).
- Release the defendants on court bail. (Many prisoners have been held without trial for way beyond the regulation custody limit of six months, with some of the Filton prisoners facing up to two years in prison before their case will be heard).
- Uphold the right to a fair trial. This would necessitate the full disclosure of relevant documents. [Serious concerns have been raised about direct political and foreign interference. Some evidence has already come to light of Israeli delegates meeting at the Attorney General’s office. Also, Priti Patel (who was forced to resign over secret meetings with Israeli officials) met with Elbit Systems CEO Martin Faussett and discussed the policing of Palestine Action, when she was Home Secretary. On 12th November lawyers will be in court, raising the issue of trial prejudice caused by public comments from police and politicians.]
- Drop the link to terror, and de-proscribe Palestine Action. Although currently the Filton and Brize Norton defendants are not facing terrorism charges, their offences are described as “linked to terrorism”. Campaigners suggest that the first defendants arrested in August 2024 set the whole plan going towards proscription, and note following the proscription in August 2025, the very next month saw the second highest month on record of arms sales to Israel.
- Shut Elbit Down. This final demand echoes that of now-proscribed Palestine Action, which was launched in 2020, and was the subject of Real Media film published the following year, long before the terrorist designation.
Reactions and support
In the press conference today MP John McDonnell called for prisoners to be released on bail and given all relevant documents so that they can defend themselves fairly in court. He said that due to the terrorist proscription and related media coverage, he was concerned they wouldn’t get a fair trial.
One of the speakers was Steve Masters, a veteran who swore an oath of allegiance to the Crown, and served in the RAF for 19 years, but is now horrified by the government’s complicity in genocide. He questioned the more than 600 RAF surveillance missions launched from our Cyprus base since the start of the assault on Gaza, many of them coinciding with Israeli military actions. He spoke of the 25 contracts (£355 million) signed with Elbit Systems since 2012, including for “battle-tested” Hermes drones, and he described a proposed £2.7 billion government contract with Elbit as a ‘moral disgrace’.
Clare Hinchcliffe, the mother of 22 year old Zoe Rogers, one of the Filton 6, described how her daughter been held incommunicado for seven days after arrest, and she spoke of the wider use of armed dawn raids against other suspects – one person was arrested in his underpants with four guns held to his head. This was only legal due to the absurdly broad definition of terrorism to include mere ‘property damage with a political aim’, and Ms Hinchcliffe called for urgent reform. She also criticised the blanket denial of bail – her daughter Zoe had no previous criminal record and is of good character.
The UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk has described the use of counter-terrorism laws against conduct “not terrorist in nature” as risking fundamental freedoms in the UK, and called the proscription of Palestine Action “disproportionate and unnecessary”. In July, four UN Special Rapporteurs also contacted the UK government, noting that “According to international standards, acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people, should not be treated as terrorism.”
Human rights advocacy campaign Cage International are also backing the hunger strike demands. Their Guantanamo Project Coordinator, Mansour Adayfi, spoke at today’s launch, highlighting the failure of the “war on terror” and warning against using terrorist powers against civilians.
His own mother was ‘sold to the CIA as an Al-Qaeda terrorist’ when he was just 18. Fifteen years later, she was released as a case of ‘mistaken identity’. One Guantanamo lawyer claimed that in the end 98% of inmates had been shown to have no connection to terrorism.
Mansour warned against the lawlessness of the Guantanamo model finding its way into the UK prison system through the Filton 24. They had been brought up by parents, schools and community to stand for what is right, and what they were doing was trying to save lives. While they are labelled as terrorists for breaking windows and damaging equipment, there has not been a single arrest among the dozens of British citizens who went to Palestine and fought alongside the IDF.
“What’s next?”, Mansour asked, warning that these terrorism powers will continue to be used by an authoritarian government (of whatever flavour) to stifle dissent, silence people and deprive them of their rights. Those Elbit UK factories manufacture drones used to murder civilians in Gaza at the moment, but tomorrow they could be making the drones to target you in your own home, and the treatment of pro-Palestine defendants in prison could be the first signs of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (torture) we saw being used against “terrorists” in Guantanamo.
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According to Francesca from Prisoners from Palestine, the forthcoming action will be the first collective hunger strike in the UK for decades, and although the government will try to ignore it at first, the campaign will continue to push its demands and escalate.
Among the several state and corporate media journalists at the press conference were the New York Times’ Lizzie Dearden and the Daily Mirror’s Patrick Hill. Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye also attended. Will a collective hunger strike, and hundreds more ‘terrorism’ arrests get the coverage it should, or as is so often the case, will it be up to independent media to tell the truth, hold the rich and powerful to account, and campaign for justice?
