A UK court is preparing to rule on whether Palestine Action can legally be designated as a proscribed terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000. The case has moved through multiple courts since mid-2025, and the outcome will reshape how judges review the government's power to ban protest groups.

How We Got Here

The sequence began when members or supporters of Palestine Action were accused of breaking into an RAF base in June 2025. The Home Office responded by moving to proscribe Palestine Action — essentially placing it on a terrorist organisations list — under the Terrorism Act 2000. This triggered a legal challenge.

Huda Ammori, a leading figure in the group, appealed the proscription decision to the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission (POAC) in late July 2025. By October 2025, the Court of Appeal made a procedural ruling that proved decisive: it said Ammori could challenge the original proscription decision itself, not merely ask for it to be reversed. This distinction mattered because it meant the courts could examine whether the government had solid legal grounds for the ban in the first place.

In February 2026, the High Court delivered the key blow: it ruled that the government's decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful. That judgment effectively eliminated the legal foundation for the designation. The Home Office, however, refused to accept the ruling. It has appealed the High Court's decision, and the Court of Appeal held hearings on 29–30 April 2026, per the Administrative Court Blog.

The Government's Argument — and the Counter-Argument

The government's core position, as reported by BBC News, is that overturning the ban would weaken ministers' counter-terrorism powers and create a troubling precedent. Proscription is one of the Home Secretary's most powerful tools: it makes membership illegal, criminalises support, and bars organising meetings. The government contends that courts should not use judicial review to second-guess whether a group truly qualifies as terrorist.

Palestine Action argues the opposite. The group's activities — direct-action protests targeting arms manufacturers connected to Israeli weapons exports — do not meet the legal definition of terrorism, even if they break other laws and disrupt normal activity. Al Jazeera reported both the government's decision to appeal and the group's interpretation of the High Court ruling as a vindication.

Why This Matters Beyond Palestine Action

The stakes stretch far wider than one protest group. The Terrorism Act 2000's proscription system has seldom faced serious judicial examination at this level, and a Court of Appeal decision upholding the High Court would force a reckoning with how the law's core terms — what counts as terrorism, when proscription is proportionate — apply to organisations that blend protest with illegal action. A ruling in the government's favour would entrench ministerial discretion in terrorism designations and likely discourage future legal challenges.

For national security lawyers, the case also opens a more technical question: how far courts will scrutinise the evidence behind a proscription order when the government defends it partly on closed-material grounds (information withheld from the defendant for security reasons). The October 2025 Court of Appeal decision — clarifying that a challenge to the initial proscription was possible — had already widened the scope for genuine judicial review of those designations.

Behind all this sits the RAF base incident, and the broader political questions about UK arms exports to Israel and Palestine Action's campaign against companies it links to those exports. Courts have worked to treat the legal questions as separate from the politics. Whether that separation will hold when an appellate judgment is handed down is, in a sense, what the case will finally test.

No judgment has yet been issued as of 14 June 2026. When it arrives, it will be the most authoritative statement in English law on where the boundary lies between protected political protest and proscribable terrorism.