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Huda Ammori Wins a Judicial Review of Palestine Action Proscription 114
August 2, 2025 in Uncategorized by craig

On Wednesday we were crammed into the unsalubrious court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice to hear the judgment from Judge Chamberlain on whether Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action would be granted a judicial review of the proscription of the organisation.

Judge Chamberlain breezed in and went immediately into a summary of his judgment, beginning with an account of the process so far. This was covered in my last report; the only new information was that the Special Advocate who had been present during the closed session was Tim Buley KC.

In this extraordinary abuse of process, the security services are allowed to bring alleged “intelligence” material into proceedings, which Huda Ammori and Palestine Action are not permitted to see. Nor are their lawyers allowed to have any idea what allegations have been made.

Instead a court-appointed “Special Advocate” is supposed to represent their interests, without being allowed to tell them what the accusations are. Nor can they tell the special advocate what points to make, as in “we absolutely have no foreign funding and have never had any contact with any foreign intelligence agencies”.

Nobody is ever allowed to know what a “Special Advocate” actually does or says in the closed session, nor what the government lawyers or those giving evidence on behalf of the security services do or say.

If I were a Special Advocate, I would do nothing except hand the judge a copy of the Dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and say: “This shows the quality of security service intelligence. Now go and wipe your arse with it.”

Having told us there had been a closed evidence process, Judge Chamberlain then gave us what he said would be a brief summary of his judgment. The link is to the full judgment.

Chamberlain said that the claimant (Huda Ammori) had introduced evidence of police action against people expressing in various ways support for the Palestinian cause. There was also evidence of people deliberately breaking the law on support for proscribed organisations.

The Home Secretary had submitted that the correct route for an appeal against proscription was to POAC (the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission). The Claimant had responded that this would take too long, until June 2026 at the earliest.

There were five reasons that POAC might not be a viable alternative remedy to a judicial review:

1) Timing – the POAC process could not conclude before mid-2026.
2) The impact on freedom of expression and assembly while the proscription remained in force.
3) There would be numerous criminal proceedings over support for Palestine Action in magistrates’ courts and crown courts up and down the country, in each of which it might be argued that the proscription was itself unlawful. There was a danger of conflicting judgments in different localities.
4) The legislation did not specify that an appeal against proscription could only be through POAC.
5) A judicial review did not close off an eventual process through POAC.

In assessing that a judicial review was a permissible route, he had declined to follow the judgment over the Kurdish Workers’ Party, because new court procedures (the Special Advocate nonsense) now permitted the courts to handle intelligence material, which they did not at the time of that case. Plus, that judgment was plainly wrong.

This was stated with such offhand disdain as to be striking. Of course judges can differ, but the bland contempt of the phrasing and delivery were unusual: “plainly wrong” to a judge of equal standing.

Which brings me to the unavoidable question of Chamberlain’s demeanour.

Sometimes my powers as a writer are not equal to the occasion. I have never seen anybody quite as self-satisfied as Chamberlain; he radiates assurance. He is the walking antithesis of impostor syndrome. It is worse than smug: there is a palpable gloat about him.

Judges in the Royal Courts are seated on an imposing tiered dais, many feet above the courtroom. Some judges attempt to diminish the distance; this can come over in different ways, from condescension to chumminess to intellectual equality.

Chamberlain does not bother. He is quite happy that our only view of him is up his nostrils.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2025/08/huda-ammori-wins-a-judicial-review-of-palestine-action-proscription/