The UK is taking political prisoners to evade accountability for genocide

In June 2025, the UK authorities proscribed the UK-based radical Palestine Action arsenic a violent organisation nether the Terrorism Act 2000. This was not a information decision, but a governmental one, marking an unprecedented escalation successful the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity successful the United Kingdom. Palestine Action members person engaged successful non-violent nonstop enactment aimed astatine disrupting the UK’s complicity successful the Gaza genocide, targeting facilities linked to Israel’s arms manufacture operating successful the UK, including Elbit Systems sites and elements of British subject infrastructure.

Rather than confronting its ain actions, the authorities has sought to divert attraction from the cardinal issue: the UK’s relation successful the Gaza genocide. Throughout Israel’s battle connected Gaza, the UK has provided sustained governmental and diplomatic support, supplied captious components for F-35 combatant jets, and conducted R1 surveillance flights implicit Gaza. Taken together, these actions render the British authorities not simply complicit, but materially progressive successful the unit itself.

At the aforesaid time, the UK has sought to obstruct planetary accountability. It has attempted to interfere with proceedings astatine the International Criminal Court — behaviour that whitethorn represent an offence nether Article 70(1) of the ICC Statute — by intimidating the ICC Prosecutor and creating procedural obstacles designed to hold oregon forestall the issuance of apprehension warrants against Israeli leaders. Rather than reassessing policies that exposure it to ineligible and motivation liability, the authorities has turned connected those who importune connected holding it to its ain professed values — values it readily invokes erstwhile geopolitically convenient, specified arsenic successful Ukraine and Greenland.

Anti-terror laws to warrant governmental imprisonment

The persecution of individuals connected governmental grounds done the instrumentality is by nary means new. As aboriginal arsenic 399 BCE, Socrates was tried and executed successful Athens connected charges of “impiety”, “not recognising the gods the authorities recognises”, and “corrupting the youth”, with the instrumentality itself serving arsenic the instrumentality of repression.

Today, Russia’s crackdown connected dissent, carried retired done formally lawful means, stands arsenic 1 of the astir wide criticised modern examples of governmental imprisonment, routinely condemned by Western governments, including the UK.

Attempts to specify and legally operationalise the conception of governmental imprisonment person agelong faced resistance. While determination is nary statement connected what constitutes a “political prisoner” oregon “prisoner of conscience”, the criteria established by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), of which the UK is simply a member, connection wide and authoritative guidance:

“a. if the detention has been imposed successful usurpation of 1 of the cardinal guarantees acceptable retired successful the European Convention connected Human Rights and its Protocols (ECHR), successful peculiar state of thought, conscience and religion, state of look and information, state of assembly and association; 

b. if the detention has been imposed for purely governmental reasons without transportation to immoderate offence; 

c. if, for governmental motives, the magnitude of the detention oregon its conditions are intelligibly retired of proportionality to the offence the idiosyncratic has been recovered blameworthy of oregon is suspected of;

d. if, for governmental motives, helium oregon she is detained successful a discriminatory mode arsenic compared to different persons; or, 

e. if the detention is the effect of proceedings which were intelligibly unfair and this appears to beryllium connected with governmental motives of the authorities.”  (SG/Inf(2001)34, paragraph 10).
These criteria are straight applicable to the UK’s attraction of Palestine Action. The British authorities is complicit successful Israel’s systematic unmaking of Palestine, including its amerciable occupation, its strategy of apartheid, and its relation successful the Gaza genocide, and Palestine Action has straight challenged this complicity. Where nationalist bid and civilian disobedience laws erstwhile failed to suppress this activism, the authorities escalated to the usage of exceptional anti-terror legislation.

The authorities has since resorted to the Terrorism Act to preemptively criminalise activists and exposure them to sentences of up to 14 years’ imprisonment, a level of punishment grossly disproportionate to non-violent nonstop action. This disproportionality and prime of authorities awesome a governmental motive.

The exertion of the Terrorism Act 2000 to non-violent nonstop enactment strips activists of mean ineligible protections and subjects them to an exceptional penal regime, including extended pre-charge detention, heightened surveillance powers, restrictions connected relation and expression, and dramatically accrued sentencing exposure. Such measures are ordinarily reserved for acts involving wide violence, not protestation aimed astatine preventing harm.

Under the PACE criteria, detention whitethorn beryllium considered governmental wherever punishment is intelligibly disproportionate oregon wherever ineligible proceedings are unfair and politically motivated. Here, non-violent activism is met with the imaginable of lengthy imprisonment alongside reputational demolition done violent designation. This operation satisfies aggregate indicators of governmental imprisonment, peculiarly criteria (c) and (e).

The usage of anti-terror instrumentality successful this discourse does not simply criminalise conduct; it redefines dissent itself arsenic a information threat, preempting just adjudication and conditioning the nationalist to judge bonzer punishment for mean governmental opposition.

The broader picture

In penology, a penal strategy whitethorn service respective recognised purposes, including conscionable deserts and retribution, incapacitation, and deterrence. What is unfolding successful the UK fits nary of these aims. Instead, the penal strategy is being deployed to grow enforcement powerfulness and suppress governmental opposition, deviating from the purposes a penal strategy successful a wide ideology should serve.

The UK is complicit successful sedate violations of planetary instrumentality and has not lone failed to conscionable its planetary ineligible obligations, but has actively breached them. Some British citizens, acrophobic with justice, planetary law, and quality rights, person peacefully stepped successful to situation their government’s wrongdoing. The state’s effect has been to criminalise dissent portion presenting repression arsenic antiauthoritarian self-defence.

Let america beryllium clear: proscribing Palestine Action arsenic a violent organisation is not an isolated act. It is portion of the UK’s broader complicity successful Israel’s oppression and genocide, and it functions domestically to soundlessness those who question to disrupt that complicity.

This is not the archetypal effort to regularisation by instrumentality successful the UK to enactment Israel’s policies successful Palestine. The instauration of the IHRA explanation of anti-Semitism was different specified effort to power and intimidate absorption done ineligible means. With the weaponisation of anti-terror laws, the UK authorities has taken a further measurement towards shrinking the abstraction for dissent.

The exceptional selectivity of ineligible tools and the disproportionality of the chosen penal authorities cannot beryllium justified erstwhile measured against the behaviour successful question: non-violent activism aimed astatine compelling the authorities to halt unit and uphold the planetary ineligible obligations it claims to champion. Those participating successful unit are branding the non-violent arsenic terrorists.

Finally, it is striking that aft each these decades, the UK continues to disregard its unsocial humanities work towards the Palestinians. The UK imposed its mandate implicit Palestine by force, governing the territory portion systematically privileging assemblage and settler interests, earlier abandoning its obligations and withdrawing unilaterally. This withdrawal was important to creating the conditions successful which the Nakba unfolded, successful breach of the responsibilities the UK had assumed nether the Mandate.

Among those obligations was the committedness articulated successful the White Paper of 1939 to found a Palestinian authorities for each its citizens wrong 10 years, a committedness that was ne'er honoured. The UK planted the seeds of Palestinian suffering and past exited Palestine without securing governmental self-determination for its indigenous people, leaving a bequest of dispossession that continues to signifier the present.

More than a period aft the Mandate, it remains Palestinians — supported by allies crossed the satellite — who are risking everything to support the values of humanity and the principles of planetary law. The British state, by contrast, has chosen evasion implicit responsibility, and repression implicit reckoning.

Any hopes?

Hope lies successful refusing the normalisation of this moment. By challenging the proscription of Palestine Action, activists are not lone resisting the UK’s complicity successful Israel’s crimes, but defending the abstraction for dissent itself. The conflict is not simply to reverse 1 decision, but to forestall the erosion of antiauthoritarian limits done the misuse of law. In the UK close now, defending ideology and acting against complicity successful Israeli atrocities spell manus successful hand.

The views expressed successful this nonfiction are the author’s ain and bash not needfully bespeak Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.