The UK is taking political prisoners to evade accountability for genocide

The UK is taking political prisoners to evade accountability for genocide The use of anti-terror law against Palestine Action is designed to block legal and political scrutiny of the UK’s role in Gaza. In June 2025, the UK government proscribed the UK-based group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000. This was not a security decision, but a political one, marking an unprecedented escalation in the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity in the United Kingdom. Palestine Action members have engaged in non-violent direct action aimed at disrupting the UK’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, targeting facilities linked to Israel’s arms industry operating in the UK, including Elbit Systems sites and elements of British military infrastructure. Rather than confronting its own actions, the government has sought to divert attention from the central issue: the UK’s role in the Gaza genocide. Throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza, the UK has provided sustained political and diplomatic support, supplied vital components for F-35 fighter jets, and conducted R1 surveillance flights over Gaza. Taken together, these actions render the British government not merely complicit, but materially involved in the violence itself. At the same time, the UK has sought to obstruct international accountability. It has attempted to interfere with proceedings at the International Criminal Court - conduct that may constitute an offence under Article 70(1) of the ICC Statute - by intimidating the ICC Prosecutor and creating procedural obstacles designed to delay or prevent the issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Rather than reassessing policies that expose it to legal and moral liability, the government has turned on those who insist on holding it to its own professed values - values it readily invokes when geopolitically convenient, such as in Ukraine and Greenland. Anti-terror laws to justify political imprisonment The persecution of individuals on political grounds through the law is by no means new. As early as 399 BCE, Socrates was tried and executed in Athens on charges of “impiety”, “not recognising the gods the state recognises”, and “corrupting the youth”, with the law itself serving as the instrument of repression. Today, Russia’s crackdown on dissent, carried out through formally lawful means, stands as one of the most widely criticised contemporary examples of political imprisonment, routinely condemned by Western governments, including the UK. Attempts to define and legally operationalise the concept of political imprisonment have long faced resistance. While there is no consensus on what constitutes a “political prisoner” or “prisoner of conscience”, the criteria established by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), of which the UK is a member, offer clear and authoritative guidance: “a. if the detention has been imposed in violation of one of the fundamental guarantees set out in the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols (ECHR), in particular freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and association; b. if the detention has been imposed for purely political reasons without connection to any offence; c. if,...

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