Sir Keir Starmer and President Donald Trump discussed Palestine Action twice on calls before the protest group was banned under terror laws, the High Court has heard.
Activists from the group painted “Gaza is not for sale” and dug up parts of the green at Mr Trump’s golf course in Scotland in March 2025, with the president writing on social media that the prime minister had assured him that “they caught the terrorists” involved.
The group was proscribed as a terror organisation in an unusual move four months later, after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and sprayed two military planes with red paint.
The ban has since led to thousands of people being arrested under terror laws for holding up signs saying they support it.
Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori is challenging the ban at the High Court, with her barrister telling judges that the impact of the proscription was “dramatic, severe, widespread and potentially lifelong”.
It has previously been reported that Sir Keir asked for updates from Police Scotland on protesters arrested over the attack on Mr Trump’s golf course, and briefed Mr Trump on the developments. Now, documents submitted to the court reveal that the pair discussed the protest group twice in calls on 10 and 30 March 2025.
Mr Husain KC, for the claimant, said that the decision by then-home secretary Yvette Cooper to proscribe the organisation in June 2025 was “novel and unprecedented”. He told the court: “This is the first direct action civil disobedience organisation that does not advocate for violence ever to be proscribed as terrorism”.
He added that the decision, which Ms Cooper faltered over, was “so extreme as to render the UK an international outlier”.
Advice from the Foreign Office in March said that “Palestine Action is active in other countries, but its activity is largely viewed by international partners as activism and not extremism or terrorism”, Mr Husain explained.
“As the FCDO noted, acting in this way [proscribing the group] may be interpreted as an over-reaction by the UK,” he added.
On 7 March 2025, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre found that Palestine Action was concerned with terrorism, and the Proscription Review Group concluded the same on 13 March, documents submitted to court show.
Mr Husain told the High Court: “Serious damage to property is not violence, there are incidental acts of violence, but this is not a group that advocates violence. Those acts are not the norm, they are rare”.
Banning the group after the RAF Brize Norton incident, 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, which a court heard this week saw an activist allegedly hit a police sergeant with a sledgehammer, in her reasoning.
Woolwich Crown Court heard on Monday that the officer thought her spine was “shattered” when she was hit in her lower back while she was on her knees arresting a female activist.
Owen Greenhall, representing the claimant, told the High Court on Wednesday that there was a “very significant chilling” effect from Palestine Action’s terror ban. He pointed to a photo of someone holding a sign saying ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’ and told judges that the arrest of people for holding this sign “goes too far and it exemplifies the problem of proscription in this instance”.
“To say Palestine Action are not terrorists... is to exercise one’s right to free speech to criticise proscription,” Mr Greenhall said.
More than 2,350 people have been arrested for supporting Palestine Action since its proscription, action group Defend Our Juries have said.
The full hearing of the legal challenge, before Dame Victoria Sharp, Mr Justice Swift and Mrs Justice Steyn, is set to take place over two days at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
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