Home Office spent £700,000 fighting Palestine Action legal battle over terror proscription, data reveals

The Home Office has spent nearly £700,000 on fighting a legal battle against the co-founder of Palestine Action over the group’s terror ban.

Huda Ammori, co-founder of the group, has challenged the government’s decision to ban the organisation under anti-terrorism laws in the courts. Since the proscription, thousands of people have been arrested for holding signs declaring support for Palestine Action and the move has been condemned as “an enormous overreach of the UK’s terrorism powers” by human rights groups. A decision by the High Court in the case is expected tomorrow.

The Home Office has been charged £694,390.03 exclusive of VAT for work on the case against Ms Ammori, freedom of information data shared with The Independent shows. This includes the legal fees of the government legal department, fees of counsel instructed in the case, and other court fees.

The fees are however dwarfed by the costs of policing protests in support of Palestine Action since the terror ban was enforced, which run into the millions of pounds. The ban came into force in early July last year making supporting Palestine Action a criminal offence, with membership or expressing support for the group punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

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The Metropolitan Police told the London Assembly in October last year that it has cost around £3.6m to police protests, arrests and carry out other enforcement action associated with the proscription of Palestine Action - a figure which will have grown over recent months.

Lawyers for Ms Ammori argued in the High Court that the decision by the then-home secretary Yvette Cooper to proscribe Palestine Action was “novel and unprecedented”.

Raza Hussain KC said that the group was a “direct action civil disobedience organisation that does not advocate for violence”. He said that any examples of serious violence committed by the group against property or person “are not the norm, they are rare”. Government data shows that in the year up to September 2025 there were 1,630 arrests linked to supporting Palestine Action.

Activists who have organised protests against the proscription believe this is much higher, with 2,787 people arrested for holding signs in support of Palestine Action.

The group was proscribed after an incident in June last year where activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and sprayed two military planes with red paint. Ms Cooper cited the group’s protest at a weapons equipment factory in Glasgow in 2022, and its targeting of Israeli defence technology company Elbit Systems UK in Bristol in her reasoning for proscribing Palestine Action.

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Ms Cooper had faltered over the decision, initially deciding to go ahead with the terror ban in May last year before she paused the decision and requested further information. One month later, on 20 June, she then confirmed that the proscription should go ahead.

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries, who have campaigned to lift the ban on Palestine Action, said: “None of the costs arising from this crackdown are in the public interest. These are unnecessary and politically-driven costs that serve only to protect companies which the UN has named as profiting from genocide and the state of Israel itself”.

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Yasmine Ahmed, UK director of Human Rights Watch, said: “The staggering costs of this court case emphasise how committed the UK government is to stifling legitimate criticism of Israel.

“The use of counter-terrorism legislation to proscribe Palestine Action is a grave abuse of state power and just one of a suite of measures this government is using to curtail people’s right to protest”.

Akiko Hart, director of human rights organisation Liberty, said that Ms Ammori’s legal case will “have profound implications for how counter-terror powers are used against protesters in the future”.

She said that the proscription was “disproportionate”, adding: “The decision has created a wider chilling effect that leaves people uncertain about what is, and what isn’t considered an offence once a group is proscribed”.

The comments come after a woman appeared in court on terrorism charges this week after allegedly holding up a placard relating to Palestine Action.

The charge alleges that Catriona Roberts, 23, carried the placard at St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, "in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that you were a member or a supporter of a proscribed organisation as defined by the aforementioned act namely, Palestine Action."