The proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 represents more than an aggressive application of counter-terrorism law. It reveals a broader, qualitative shift in the British state’s approach to political dissent—one best understood, I argue, through the concept of ‘anticipatory repression’.

Proscription and Its Critics

Palestine Action is a direct action network that has, since 2020, targeted factories and offices involved in manufacturing weapons components used by Israel in its military operations in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Its tactics—occupations, blockades, and damage to buildings and machinery—are consciously disruptive and unlawful, but have not generally involved violence against people. The group has focused particularly on disrupting the operations of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, and the supply chains connecting British territory to Israel’s military operations. In July 2025, following an action at RAF Brize Norton in which activists reportedly damaged military transport aircraft alleged to be supplying weaponry to Israel, the Home Secretary made an Order proscribing the organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000, relying on the ‘serious damage to property’ limb of the statutory definition, which was approved by resolution in both Houses of Parliament.

The legal basis for proscription rests on section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which permits the Secretary of State to proscribe an organisation if she ‘believes that it is concerned in terrorism’. Section 1(2) of the Act defines terrorism to include action involving ‘serious damage to property’ where the action is ‘designed to influence the government’ or ‘made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause’. This property-damage threshold had previously been rarely invoked, with successive governments recognising the danger of conflating damage to property with the kind of serious political violence that terrorism legislation was designed to address.

The decision to proscribe Palestine Action has attracted widespread criticism. The Independent Commission on UK Counter-Terrorism Law, chaired by former Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan KC and including former Attorney General Dominic Grieve and Richard Barrett, former Global Counter-Terrorism Director of MI6, concluded that the terrorism definition is ‘too broad’ and that the property-damage threshold should apply only where conduct ‘creates a serious risk to life, national security, or public safety’. The report further noted that the ‘proscription of Palestine Action highlights several of the features of and concerns about the power to proscribe’. UN human rights experts have described the ban as a ‘disturbing misuse’ of terrorism powers against protest activity. Michael O’Flaherty, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the Home Secretary expressing grave concerns about the use of anti-terrorism laws against peaceful protesters and the danger of imposing excessive limits on the rights to free speech and protest. When former Lord Chief Justices, senior intelligence officials, and critical legal scholars converge on the same concern, and international human rights bodies issue warnings, it is clear the state has crossed a fundamental line.

Beyond Disproportionality: The Logic of Anticipatory Repression

The standard critique of the proscription decision focuses on proportionality: terrorism laws designed for organisations engaged in serious political violence should not be applied to a direct action group whose tactics target property, not people. As Nour Haidar has argued on this blog, the decision collapses the distinction between violence against the person and damage to property, representing ‘a seismic break with constitutional norms’. This is the language of doctrinal overreach, of misapplication, of disproportionate means. It suggests that the state has simply got the balance wrong—that a more careful application of the proportionality test, a more rigorous interpretation of the terrorism threshold, would restore the equilibrium between security and liberty.

This critique is necessary and valid, but incomplete. It treats the proscription as an error of classification, a technical misstep that better legal reasoning could correct. But the deeper significance lies in what the proscription of Palestine Action reveals about the temporal and political logic of contemporary state repression. To understand what is at stake, we need to attend not just to whether the legal categorisation is proportionate, but to what the categorisation is designed to achieve.

Palestine Action’s activities were already being prosecuted under the ordinary criminal law. Many activists have received significant custodial sentences for criminal damage, aggravated trespass, and public nuisance. Prosecutions have been successful. Convictions have been secured. Individuals have been imprisoned. The criminal law, in other words, was “working”—imposing consequences for unlawful acts, deterring some would-be protesters, and extracting a cost from those who persist. If the objective were simply to punish past conduct and deter future infractions, the existing legal framework was adequate to the task.

Proscription, however, does something different. It does not wait for conduct to occur and then punish it. It seeks to eliminate the future capacity for such conduct by criminalising the organisational form itself. Under sections 11 and 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, membership of a proscribed organisation becomes a criminal offence punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment. Inviting support for the organisation, arranging or addressing a meeting to support it, or even wearing clothing or displaying an article in public in a way that arouses reasonable suspicion of membership or support—all become criminal acts. The proscription turns not just disruptive action but the infrastructure of mobilisation—the network, the solidarity, the public expression of allegiance—into terrorism. It targets not what Palestine Action has done but what it might do; not past disruption but anticipated future mobilisation; not individual offenders but the collective capacity to organise.

This is anticipatory repression: the pre-emptive engineering of legal and institutional frameworks designed to prevent the crystallisation of future political challenges before they can meaningfully threaten the existing order. It is not simply reactive—responding to disorder after it occurs—but pre-emptive, targeting the foreseeable political consequences of protest rather than merely its immediate disruption. Anticipatory repression rests on a tacit recognition that the structural conditions generating protest will persist, and that those conditions cannot or will not be addressed at their roots. Rather than eliminating the causes of dissent, the state apparatus “tools up” in advance to manage its inevitability. The law becomes not a framework for adjudicating competing rights but an architecture for foreclosing political possibility.

The structural conditions here are not hard to identify. Since October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has produced mass civilian death on such a scale that the International Court of Justice has found a plausible risk that rights under the Genocide Convention are being violated and has ordered provisional measures. A UN Commission of Inquiry, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have concluded that Israel is committing genocide. The scale of destruction has been extraordinary: entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, medical facilities systematically targeted, universities and schools destroyed, starvation used as a weapon of war. Britain, under successive governments, has provided military and diplomatic support for this campaign. Arms exports to Israel have continued. Diplomatic cover has been provided at the United Nations. Evidence of genocide has been denied or minimised. Palestine Action targeted precisely that nexus: the factories and airbases where Britain’s complicity is materialised—where weapons are manufactured, where aircraft depart, where the supply chain of destruction can be physically disrupted.

Palestine Action thus sits at the intersection of imperial alliance, racialised violence, and arms capital—the material infrastructure of Britain’s integration into what Francesca Albanese terms the “collective crime” of Gaza’s destruction. This is not incidental to the severity of the state’s response. The British state cannot address the root cause of anti-genocide protests, whether mass mobilisations or the peaceful direct action of Palestine Action and others, because it is structurally committed to the relationships—with Israel, the United States, the global arms industry—that generate it. Britain’s role as a junior partner in the US-led imperial order, its arms industry’s integration into global supply chains, its strategic interest in maintaining Israel as what has been termed a “garrison state” for Western interests in the Middle East—these are not policies that can be reformed or abandoned. They are structural commitments that define Britain’s position in the contemporary global order.

The Siege Architecture and Its Judicial Endorsement

The proscription of Palestine Action is the latest addition to what can be called the siege architecture of British protest law, the cumulative construction and deployment of offences, powers, and narratives that progressively close down space for disruptive protest. The metaphor of siege is used quite deliberately here. Unlike a frontal attack, a siege is not a single confrontation but a sustained strategy of encirclement, a progressive tightening of constraints designed to exhaust the capacity for resistance. There have been numerous recent legislative interventions which have added further layers to this architecture.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 created a statutory offence of public nuisance, codifying the common law but with a maximum sentence of ten years’ imprisonment for non-violent disruption. It expanded police powers to impose conditions on protests, lowering the threshold for intervention from ‘serious’ to ‘more than minor’ disruption. The Public Order Act 2023 went further, creating specific offences of ‘locking on’ and interference with key national infrastructure, targeting the tactics that environmental protesters had developed. Most significantly, it introduced Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPOs), that can be imposed in the magistrates’ court, on the balance of probabilities, where the court is satisfied that an individual has on at least two occasions committed protest‑related offences or protest‑related breaches of injunctions, and which may restrict future ‘activities related to a protest’ for up to two years. These can include electronic tagging and curfews, and breach of the associated conditions is a criminal offence. They permit the state to restrict future protest activity based on speculation about what an individual might do, inverting the presumption that liberty is the default and restriction requires justification.

The National Security Act 2023 added another dimension, expanding the definition of ‘prohibited places’ under the Official Secrets Act to include private defence contractors. This transformed protest activity at arms factories from trespass into potential threats to national security, enabling the state to cast direct action against weapons manufacturers as foreign interference or sabotage. The Crime and Policing Bill 2025, currently before Parliament, proposes ‘cumulative impact’ provisions that would permit police to impose conditions on protests not based on the particular demonstration at hand but on the history of the campaign—explicitly targeting sustained mobilisations like the Palestine solidarity demonstrations that have brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets.

Crucially, the courts have endorsed this anticipatory logic. In R v Hallam, applying Trowland, the Court of Appeal upheld severe sentences for non-violent environmental protesters on the basis that Parliament, by setting a ten-year maximum for statutory public nuisance, had clearly contemplated ‘stringent custodial sentences’ for intentional protest disruption. The court rejected arguments that long sentences would have an impermissible ‘chilling effect’ on the exercise of individuals’ Article 10 and 11 ECHR rights, holding that these protections are ‘significantly weakened’ where protesters choose maximally disruptive tactics. The court explicitly stated that deterrence of the wider movement is a legitimate sentencing aim. In other words, the ‘chill’ on disruptive movements is not a regrettable side-effect but the intended purpose.

The courts charged with policing proportionality have re-cast that doctrine as a vehicle for general deterrence rather than a shield for disruptive protest. Proportionality review, which was supposed to act as a constraint on state power, has become a mechanism for its legitimation. There is no reason to think courts willing to endorse this deterrent logic for environmental protest will treat Palestine solidarity differently. If anything, the explicitly anti-imperial and anti-racist character of Palestine solidarity makes it more threatening to the established order, not less.

Forms Without Substance

Writing against Pitt’s Gagging Acts in 1795, Samuel Taylor Coleridge warned that the new treason and sedition laws would destroy effective political opposition in Britain while preserving its outward forms. As he put it, ‘the forms of [the right to petition] indeed will remain … but the reality will have flown’. Coleridge’s point was not that the statutes were unusually repressive by the standards of the eighteenth century—they were, but that was not what troubled him most. What disturbed him was the insidiousness of the method: the preservation of a facade of rights while systematically eliminating the capacity to exercise them meaningfully. For Coleridge, despotism was not the abolition of rights but their substantive hollowing, a regime ‘in which the people at large have no voice in the legislature, and possess no other safe or established mode of political interference: in few words, where the majority are always acted upon, never acting’.

The parallel is instructive. The right to protest today occupies a similar position. On paper, Articles 10 and 11 ECHR remain in force. The Human Rights Act 1998 has not been repealed. Courts continue to conduct proportionality review. Ministers assure Parliament that they remain committed to the protection of peaceful protest. The forms are preserved. But in practice, they operate within an anticipatory siege in which protest organisers face expansive criminal liability for ‘causing disruption’, individuals can be subjected to civil orders restricting their liberty on the basis of past ‘protest-related activity’, and whole organisations can be removed from legal and political space via proscription—with membership, financial support, or even public statements of solidarity recast as terrorist conduct.

The doctrine of proportionality, which was supposed to protect protest by requiring the state to justify restrictions, has been repurposed as a mechanism for legitimating repression. The courts ask whether Parliament has adequately balanced the competing interests, and the answer is almost invariably that it has. Parliament has spoken. The legislation is clear. The statutory maxima are high. The deterrent intent is manifest. Proportionality is satisfied not because the restrictions are minimal but because Parliament has expressly contemplated severe sanctions for disruptive protest. The doctrine that was meant to constrain legislative power becomes the vehicle for its endorsement.

Coleridge called the peace produced by such measures ‘cadaverous tranquillity’: the stillness of the grave mistaken for social harmony. The metaphor is apt. The peace of contemporary repression is achieved by killing the political vitality of the population—not through the spectacular violence of authoritarian crackdowns, which might provoke resistance and international condemnation, but through the progressive narrowing of what is legally and politically possible until effective dissent simply ceases. We retain the right to protest, provided we do not use it to achieve anything. We retain the right to dissent, provided our dissent remains comfortably ineffectual. Indeed, this much was candidly conceded by the current Home Secretary, when, in the context of telling pro-Palestine protesters during a period of heightened security concerns that they could ‘get back to your protest later’, she argued that ‘just because you have the freedom to protest doesn’t mean you have to use it’.

Consequences and Contradictions

The immediate consequences illustrate this hollowing. Since the proscription came into effect on 5 July 2025, over 2,200 arrests have been made for alleged support of Palestine Action, with many individuals targeted for carrying placards, attending demonstrations, or making statements of solidarity. Because Palestine Action is now a proscribed organisation, holding a placard that is understood as expressing support for Palestine Action can be prosecuted under various offences in sections 12 and 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000, including inviting or recklessly expressing support for a proscribed organisation (section 12, carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years’ imprisonment) or displaying an article in circumstances arousing reasonable suspicion of membership or support (section 13, carrying a maximum sentence of six months’ imprisonment or a fine). The police have interpreted the prohibition broadly, arresting individuals not just for active participation in protests but for passive displays of solidarity. The effect has been a dramatic expansion of what counts as terrorism beyond anything previously contemplated in British law.

The human cost has been severe. UN human rights experts have warned that Palestine Action-linked detainees on hunger strike, held for extended periods on remand awaiting trial, face risks of organ failure and death. The Justice Secretary has refused to meet them or their lawyers, treating their hunger strikes as a matter for operational decision-making by prison authorities rather than a political or legal question requiring ministerial intervention. The normalisation of prolonged pre-trial detention for individuals accused of terrorism offences, even where the ‘terrorism’ consists of holding a placard or attending a demonstration, marks a significant departure from established norms.

One of the founding members of Palestine Action has brought a judicial review challenging the proscription, and the procedural history of the case is itself revealing. The Home Secretary initially argued that the proper forum for challenge was the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC)—a closed tribunal where much of the evidence can be heard in secret and where the applicant may be excluded from parts of the hearing. In October 2025, the Court of Appeal rejected this argument, holding that the particular circumstances of the case—including the mass arrests and the urgency of the situation—made judicial review the appropriate route. The decision was significant, but it should not obscure what it reveals about the architecture of challenge. POAC is designed to foreclose precisely the kind of public scrutiny that judicial review permits. Its procedures favour the state. Its closed hearings prevent public accountability. Its very existence reflects the anticipatory design of terrorism legislation: a specialist tribunal where challenges to executive proscription can be contained and managed.

As Conor Crummey has argued on this blog, the High Court’s initial decision to grant permission for judicial review primarily on human rights grounds, while rejecting the ultra vires arguments that challenged whether the Home Secretary had acted within her statutory powers, signals the narrowing horizons of legality. The question whether the Terrorism Act 2000, properly construed in light of the principle of legality and the constitutional traditions that restrict the executive’s power to criminalise political association, permits the proscription of a direct action group at all has been sidelined rather than addressed. This is a familiar pattern in contemporary public law: human rights grounds remain available, providing a veneer of rights protection, while deeper questions about statutory construction, the separation of powers, and the limits of executive discretion are foreclosed. The result is that, even after the Court of Appeal allowed the challenge to be expanded to include some further domestic grounds, contestation is channelled into a narrow terrain—proportionality balancing under Articles 10 and 11—where the government’s security rationale carries great weight and where courts have repeatedly shown deference to legislative and executive judgments about public order.

But whatever the judicial review’s outcome, anticipatory repression generates its own contradictions. The attempt to suppress solidaristic protest does nothing to address the underlying drivers: Britain’s complicity in genocide, deepening inequality, accelerating ecological breakdown, the structural crisis of a capitalist-imperial order that can neither resolve its internal contradictions nor tolerate effective challenges to its reproduction. The conditions that generate mass protest persist. Proscribing Palestine Action does not end the genocide in Gaza. Imprisoning climate activists does not stop the climate emergency. Imposing SDPOs on housing campaigners does not solve the housing crisis. The law can constrain, deter, and punish. But it cannot eliminate the contradictions that produce dissent. As Coleridge warned: ‘They who sow pestilence must reap whirlwinds’. The Two Acts of 1795 did not eradicate democratic or working-class radicalism; they drove it into new forms and contributed to the explosive confrontations of the early nineteenth century.

Whether the contemporary siege architecture will produce similar long-term consequences is an open question. What is clear is that these measures are not neutral updates to keep pace with new protest tactics. They constitute a systematic attempt to foreclose political possibility. Naming anticipatory repression for what it is—and contesting it on that terrain, not merely as disproportionate application of existing categories—is the task that the proscription of Palestine Action now places before us.

Paul O’Connell, Reader in Law at SOAS, University of London.

(Suggested citation: P. O’Connell, ‘Anticipatory Repression and the Proscription of Palestine Action’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (12th January 2026) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))