The High Court in London strikes a note for freedom of speech

Friday 13 February 2026

Today 13 February 2026, the Divisional Court of the High Court in London held that the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was unlawful. The case is R (on the application of Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin), Case No AC-2025-LON-002122. 

The Court sat as a Divisional Court comprising the President of the King’s Bench Division (Dame Victoria Sharp), Mr Justice Swift and Mrs Justice Steyn DBE. That composition matters. When the President sits with two other senior judges, it is a signal that the issues are not merely technical but constitutional in character—touching the boundary between executive power and fundamental rights.

The judgment does not sanitise Palestine Action. The Court records, plainly, that the group has promoted its political cause through criminality and the encouragement of criminality.  But it is one thing to say that criminal damage and trespass should be met with the criminal law. It is another to say that a banner under which some people commit offences may be treated, for the purposes of the Terrorism Act 2000, as a terrorist organisation—thereby converting a wide range of expressive and associative conduct into terrorism offences, including offences that can be committed by “expressing an opinion or belief” supportive of a proscribed group in circumstances that are said to be reckless. 

That is the hinge upon which this case turns.

What the Court decided

The claimant, Huda Ammori, challenged the Home Secretary’s 2025 decision to add Palestine Action to Schedule 2 of the Terrorism Act 2000 via the Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2025, which came into force on 5 July 2025. The judicial review proceeded on four grounds. The Court rejected two and upheld two. 

The Court rejected:

• Procedural fairness: the argument that Palestine Action should have been given an opportunity to make representations before the Home Secretary laid the draft proscription order before Parliament. 

  
  

• Failure to take relevant considerations into account: the argument that the Home Secretary had failed to consider relevant matters when deciding to pursue proscription. 

The Court upheld:

• Breach of the Home Secretary’s own proscription policy: the Home Secretary has a published policy setting out how she will exercise the discretion to proscribe, including consideration of the nature and scale of an organisation’s activities and the specific threat it poses to the United Kingdom. The Court held that the Home Secretary had treated a supposed advantage of proscription—namely that it would create additional “levers” for law enforcement through offences and other statutory consequences—as a factor supporting proscription. The Court held that this was inconsistent with the purpose of the policy, which is meant to constrain the discretion: an “other factor” must explain why proscription is necessary beyond the threshold belief that the organisation is “concerned in terrorism”. 

  
  

• Human Rights Act 1998: the Court held that proscription entailed a very significant interference with the rights protected by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of expression, and freedom of association and peaceful assembly). The key analytical move is subtle and important. The Court held that what requires justification is not the restriction upon non-peaceful, criminal conduct (which the Convention does not protect), but the restriction upon peaceful protest that would otherwise fall within Convention rights, carried out “under the Palestine Action banner”. 

From there the reasoning tightens. Because the policy had not been properly applied, the Court held the interference with Convention rights was not “prescribed by law” for the purposes of section 6 of the Human Rights Act. And even putting that point to one side, the Court concluded that proscription was disproportionate: only a very small number of Palestine Action’s activities amounted to “terrorism” within the statutory definition, and—crucially—the general criminal law remains available for criminal damage and related offences. In other words the state had reached for a constitutional sledgehammer where ordinary tools were already to hand.

The immediate practical effect—and the Police response

There is an unavoidable, almost theatrical, quality to the gap between law on the page and law on the street. A High Court judgment can declare an executive act unlawful, but the legal machinery still has to grind through relief, orders and appeals.

A point repeatedly made in reporting today is that the proscription does not necessarily fall away instantly. The Court has, at least for the moment, not finally removed Palestine Action from the proscribed list while the government pursues an appeal. That means uncertainty for people who, until this morning, were being arrested in large numbers for alleged support offences—often in circumstances involving placards, slogans or symbolic demonstrations. 

Into that uncertainty stepped the Police. Multiple outlets reported that police forces—most prominently the Metropolitan Police—announced that they would no longer arrest people at the point of protest for expressing support for Palestine Action, adopting instead an evidence-gathering posture pending the conclusion of proceedings. 

This is operationally intelligible, and constitutionally awkward.

Operationally, police leaders are trying to avoid arrests that may later be judged to have been unjustified—particularly arrests for expression that the Court has now found to be caught by a disproportionate and unlawfully applied measure. Constitutionally however we are left with an uneasy interim period in which a proscription may still formally exist, while police practice changes because the courts have declared the underlying decision unlawful, and the government insists the matter is not finished.

That interim period is where British liberty most often lives—neither in slogans nor in statutes, but in the daily discretion of officials who must decide whether to coerce.

Why the judgment matters for Britain’s free-speech tradition

It is tempting to narrate this as an activist victory and a ministerial defeat. That is too small a frame.

The deeper story is that modern British public law has become, in practice, the arena in which the old British tradition of liberty is tested—liberty not as licence, but as the principle that the state must justify its coercive powers with reasons that survive scrutiny.

Britain has no single written constitutional text guaranteeing free speech. Instead she has a dense inheritance: Parliament’s historic suspicion of prerogative power, the common law’s presumption against coercion without clear authority, the post-war embedding of Convention rights via the Human Rights Act 1998, and the modern courts’ insistence that even politically charged “national security” measures must be reasoned, proportionate and legally structured.

This case draws all those strands together.

1. The Court refused to treat proscription as a mere political label

   
   

   Proscription is not simply the executive declaring that a group is beyond the pale. It is the creation of a legal environment in which words, symbols, meetings and affiliations become criminally charged. The Court’s analysis proceeds from that reality: the interference with Articles 10 and 11 is not incidental, but central. 

   
   

2. The Court insisted that the executive follow its own policy

   
   

   This is an old British constitutional idea, dressed in modern clothing—that government must govern according to rules she has announced, not according to expediency discovered after the event. The Court did not say that the Home Secretary can never proscribe a group like Palestine Action. It said that, if she is to use that drastic power, she must apply her policy as a genuine constraint, not as window dressing. 

   
   

3. The judgment separates criminality from terrorism—without romanticising either

   
   

   The Court’s reasoning does not create a “right to commit criminal damage”. It acknowledges that the Convention does not protect violent or non-peaceful protest. But it refuses the conflation that has become increasingly common in democracies under stress: the idea that because a movement contains criminality, the state may treat the entire movement as terrorist, with all the collateral consequences that such a label entails.

   
   

4. The judgment treats chilling effects as legally real

   
   

   One of the most corrosive features of modern public order policy is its tendency to rely upon self-restraint—on citizens becoming cautious, silent, embarrassed to associate. The Court’s conclusion that proscription produces “very significant interference” with lawful expression and assembly is, in effect, a judicial acknowledgement that chilling effects are not airy academic notions but practical forms of coercion. 

Consequences—and risks

The first consequence is obvious: if the judgment stands, it will be harder for any future Home Secretary to use proscription as a shortcut around the criminal law where the underlying conduct is already criminally chargeable. That is not a technical constraint; it is a reassertion of the idea that terrorism law is exceptional, and must remain so, precisely because its spillover into speech is so wide.

The second consequence is less comfortable for those who favour civil liberties. The Court’s rejection of the procedural fairness ground is a reminder that, in national security-adjacent contexts, courts will not always impose a duty to give prior notice and invite representations before the state acts. That is not necessarily wrong. It is, however, a warning: the protections for speech in Britain are often strongest after the event, through the courts—rather than before the event, through consultation.

The third consequence concerns policing. Today’s apparent decision to stop arresting for expressions of support may reduce immediate confrontation on the streets. But evidence-gathering for later enforcement still implies a form of surveillance of speech. If the state’s posture becomes: we will not arrest you now, but we will keep a file on what you said, just in case, then the chilling effect does not vanish; it mutates.

And there is a final, broader implication. When ministers and officials discover that “terrorism” is a label that can be judicially contested—tested against policy, proportionality and rights—they may be more cautious in applying it to domestic protest movements. Or they may seek other legislative routes—public order measures, expanded injunctions, civil penalties—that achieve similar practical suppression without the political drama of proscription. A free-speech tradition survives not only by winning the grand cases, but by resisting the quiet substitutions.

For the moment, though, the High Court has done something characteristically British. It has not offered a manifesto. It has offered a method—reason, legality, proportionality, and the insistence that power must explain itself.

In a year in which Britain has looked, at times, as though she is forgetting what she is, that method is not insubstantial.