Home Office spent £700,000 fighting Palestine Action legal battle over terror proscription, data reveals
The Home Office has spent nearly £700,000 fighting a legal battle against the co-founder of the Palestine Movement over the group’s terrorism ban.
The group’s co-founder, Huda Ammori, challenged the government’s decision to ban the organization under anti-terrorism laws in the courts. Following the ban, thousands of people were arrested for holding banners supporting Palestine Action, a move condemned by human rights groups as “an excessive use of the UK’s terrorism powers”. The Supreme Court is expected to give its decision on the case tomorrow.
The Home Office was charged £694,390.03 excluding VAT for its work on the case against Ms Ammori, shared via freedom of information data Independent shows. This includes legal fees from the government’s legal department, attorneys’ fees ordered in the case, and other court fees.
But these fees are dwarfed by the multimillion-pound cost of policing protests in support of Palestine Action since the terrorism ban came into force. The ban came into force in early July last year, making it a crime to support Palestine Action; Being a member of or supporting the group can be punished with up to 14 years in prison.
The Metropolitan Police told the London Assembly in October last year that it had cost around £3.6 million to enforce protests, arrests and other enforcement related to the ban on Palestine Action; This figure will increase in recent months.
Ms Ammori’s lawyers argued in the High Court that then home secretary Yvette Cooper’s decision to ban Palestine Action was “new and unprecedented”.
Raza Hussain KC said the group was a “direct action civil disobedience organization that does not advocate violence.” He said serious examples of violence by the group against property or people were “rare, not the norm.” Government data shows there were 1,630 arrests linked to supporting Palestine Action in the year to September 2025.
Activists protesting against the ban believe this figure is much higher; 2,787 people were arrested for holding banners supporting Palestine Action.
The group was banned after an incident in June last year when activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and sprayed two military aircraft with red paint. In her rationale for banning Palestine Action, Ms Cooper cited the group’s 2022 protest at a weapons equipment factory in Glasgow and its targeting of Israeli defense technology company Elbit Systems UK in Bristol.
Ms Cooper vacillated on the decision, first deciding to impose the terrorism ban in May last year, then pausing the decision and requesting more information. A month later, on June 20, he confirmed that the ban should continue.
A spokesman for Defend Our Juries, which is campaigning for the ban on Palestine Action to be lifted, said: “None of the costs arising from this crackdown are in the public interest. They are unnecessary and politically motivated costs that serve only to protect the state of Israel and the companies that the UN says are profiting from genocide.”
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Yasmine Ahmed, UK director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The staggering costs of this case show how determined the UK government is to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel.
“The use of anti-terrorism laws to ban Palestine Action is a serious abuse of state power and is just one of a number of measures the government uses to restrict people’s right to protest.”
Akiko Hart, director of the human rights organization Liberty, said Ms Ammori’s legal case “will have profound implications for how counter-terrorism forces are used against protesters in the future”.
He said the ban was “disproportionate”, adding: “The decision had a wider chilling effect, leaving people uncertain about what would and would not be criminalized when a group was banned.”
The comments came after a woman appeared in court this week on terrorism charges for allegedly carrying a banner related to Palestine Action.
The indictment alleges that Catriona Roberts, 23, carried the banner at St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh “in a manner or under circumstances which give rise to reasonable suspicion that you are a member or supporter of a proscribed organization as defined by the above-mentioned statute, Palestine Action”.
