Lawmakers in the UK have voted to proscribe marketing campaign group Palestine Motion as a “terrorist” organisation, elevating fears about freedom of expression within the nation.
Parliament voted 385-26 in favour of the measure in opposition to the group on Wednesday, the transfer coming after its activists broke right into a navy base final month and sprayed purple paint on two planes in protest on the UK’s help for Israel’s battle on Gaza.
Critics decried the chilling impact of the ban, which places Palestine Motion on a par with armed teams like al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) within the UK, making it a felony offence to help or be a part of the protest group.
“Allow us to be clear: to equate a twig can of paint with a suicide bomb isn’t simply absurd, it’s grotesque. It’s a deliberate distortion of the legislation to relax dissent, criminalise solidarity, and suppress the reality,” stated lawmaker Zarah Sultana, a member of the ruling Labour occasion.
Zarah Sultana not solely stands in opposition to the proscription of our group, she declares we’re all Palestine Motion❤️ pic.twitter.com/IyKzkFHfpC
— Palestine Motion (@Pal_action) July 2, 2025
Sacha Deshmukh, chief government of Amnesty Worldwide UK, slammed the transfer as “unprecedented authorized overreach”, stating that it gave the authorities “huge powers to arrest and detain individuals, suppress speech and reporting, conduct surveillance and take different measures”.
“Utilizing them in opposition to a direct-action protest group is an egregious abuse of what they have been created for,” he stated.
Reporting from London, Al Jazeera’s Milena Veselinovic stated that protesters gathering outdoors Westminster had confirmed “defiance”.
“[They are] saying that they’d nonetheless discover a technique to present help and hopefully not get arrested. However even when they do get arrested, a lot of them have instructed us that it isn’t the worst factor on the planet,” she stated.
The proscription order will attain parliament’s higher chamber, the Home of Lords, on Thursday. If accepted there, the ban on Palestine Motion would grow to be efficient within the following days.
The group, which has known as its proscription unjustified and an “abuse of energy,” has challenged the choice in courtroom and an pressing listening to is anticipated on Friday.
Lawmakers ‘boxed in’ by vote
Launched in July 2020, Palestine Motion says it makes use of “disruptive ways” to focus on “company enablers” and firms concerned in weapons manufacture for Israel, resembling Israel-based Elbit Techniques and French multinational Thales.
The British authorities has accused the group of inflicting thousands and thousands of kilos of injury by its actions.
On Tuesday, the group stated its activists had blocked the doorway to an Elbit website in Bristol, southwestern England. Different members reportedly occupied the rooftop of a subcontracting agency in Suffolk, jap England, that the group had linked to Elbit.
United Nations consultants appointed by the UN Human Rights Council had beforehand urged the UK authorities to rethink its risk to proscribe the group, arguing that acts of property harm with out the intention to hazard life shouldn’t be thought-about “terrorism”.
Residence Secretary Yvette Cooper, the UK’s inside minister, says that violence and felony harm haven’t any place in authentic protest, and {that a} zero-tolerance strategy was mandatory for nationwide safety.
Along with Palestine Motion, the proscription order accepted by parliament contains neo-Nazi group Maniacs Homicide Cult and the Russian Imperial Motion, a white supremacist group which seeks to create a brand new Russian imperial state.
Al Jazeera’s Veselinovic stated lawmakers had felt “boxed in” by the vote, feeling that they’d no alternative however to proscribe all three organisations.
“If they’d voted ‘no’, that may have meant that these two different organisations that they wished to ban couldn’t have been banned,” she stated.