Pressure grows on Yvette Cooper to abandon plans to ban Palestine Action | Protest

The house secretary is coming beneath growing stress to desert plans to ban Palestine Motion, as UN consultants and lots of of legal professionals warned that proscribing the group would conflate protest and terrorism.In two separate letters to Yvette Cooper, the Community for Police Monitoring (Netpol) legal professionals’ group and the Haldane Society of Socialist Attorneys mentioned that proscribing the group would set a harmful precedent.Moreover, a number of UN particular rapporteurs, together with these for shielding human rights whereas countering terrorism and for selling freedom of expression, mentioned that they had contacted the UK authorities to say that “acts of protest that harm property, however aren’t supposed to kill or injure folks, shouldn’t be handled as terrorism”.On Tuesday, two folks had been arrested after Palestine Motion claimed to have blockaded the doorway of an Israeli defence firm’s UK headquarters.Avon and Somerset police mentioned a 30-year-old girl and a 36-year-old man, each from London, had been arrested on suspicion of felony harm, unauthorised entry to a prohibited place and locking on to an individual, object or land to trigger critical disruption.Earlier, a Palestine Motion spokesperson mentioned activists had blocked the doorway to Elbit Programs in Bristol and lined it in crimson paint “to symbolise Palestinian bloodshed”.The Netpol legal professionals’ group letter, shared completely with the Guardian, was signed by 266 solicitors, barristers and authorized lecturers, together with 11 KCs and 11 legislation professors. “Proscription of a direct-action protest group is an unprecedented and intensely regressive step for civil liberties,” they write. “The conflation of protest and terrorism is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Our authorities has acknowledged that it’s dedicated to respecting the rule of legislation: this should embody the best to protest.“To make use of the Terrorism Act to ban Palestine Motion from direct motion can be an abuse of this laws and an interference with the best to protest. Misusing terrorism laws on this manner towards a protest group units a harmful precedent, threatens our democratic freedoms, and can be a terrifying blow to our civil liberties.”Signatories of the Haldane Society letter, which can be handed to Cooper earlier than MPs vote on Wednesday, embody Michael Mansfield KC and Imran Khan KC – who represented the household of Stephen Lawrence and victims of the Grenfell Tower hearth – and the Labour peer John Hendy KC.It has been signed by 1000’s of individuals together with the politicians Caroline Lucas, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the actors Adeel Akhtar and Juliet Stevenson, lecturers and vicars.The letter says: “It [a ban] would depart many atypical members of the general public susceptible – for instance, merely carrying a T-shirt saying ‘I assist Palestine Motion’ can be seen as violating the proscription and motion would have to be taken.“There are lots of risks to proscribing peaceable direct motion teams, even when their aims are these a few of us might disagree with. Present and future governments might misuse this precedent to assault different curiosity teams in future, providing no avenues for peacefully venting dissent.”The prime minister, Keir Starmer, was a member of the Haldane Society however left when he turned director of public prosecutions in 2008.The UN consultants mentioned: “Mere property harm, with out endangering life, is just not sufficiently critical to qualify as terrorism … Protest actions that aren’t genuinely ‘terrorist’, however which contain alleged property harm, ought to be correctly investigated as atypical crimes or different safety offences.”The Dwelling Workplace referred the Guardian to Cooper’s assertion final week saying the proposed ban, and feedback in a press launch issued on Monday wherein she mentioned that Palestine Motion’s acts “don’t characterize legit acts of protest and the extent of seriousness of Palestine Motion’s exercise has met the check for proscription beneath the Terrorism Act 2000”.