Haroon Siddique is the Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent. Ed Miliband has said it was never anyone’s intent to criminalise “elderly people, vicars and grannies” who have been arrested for supporting Palestine Action. Since Palestine Action became the first direct action group to be banned under the Terrorism Act in July last year, more than 3,700 people are believed to have been arrested for alleged support of the proscribed organisation.
They include 82 arrested at a demonstration outside the Labour party conference on Sunday. Later on Sunday, Miliband was challenged by two activists over the arrests while he was having a meal in Pizza Express in the city centre. In an interview on LBC radio, Andrew Marr asked him about that encounter: I can’t believe in your heart of hearts that you really think proscribing Palestine Action with all those elderly people and vicars and grannies and so on as a terrorist organisation was a sensible political … I don’t think anyone’s intent was to have those people criminalised.
But obviously the supreme court has got to look at this issue and obviously it’s something we keep looking at as government. On 4 and 5 November, the supreme court is due to hear a legal challenge to the ban on Palestine Action, arguing that it represents a disproportionate interference with the right to freedom of speech and freedom of protest. A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries, which organised the civil disobedience campaign against the ban, said: We welcome the foreign secretary’s honesty on this matter.
He has finally admitted that it wasn’t the government’s intention to criminalise people for peacefully protesting against the genocide and the proscription, let alone to treat them as terrorists. Basically he’s acknowledged that the government didn’t properly think the proscription through and that it’s had a disproportionate impact on the right to free speech. You’d think that leaves the government in an impossible position for defending the proscription before the supreme court.
We gladly accept the offer Ed Miliband made in Pizza Express to have a conversation with us.
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