Summary: The UK government’s shenanigans around Palestine Action undermines fundamental principles of rule of law

In 2010, Tom Bingham — former Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, and Law Lord — demonstrated in his book The Rule of Law that the concept is fundamental to any tolerably functioning democracy. He set out eight principles, including that:
• legal rights and liabilities must be determined by law, not the arbitrary discretion of, for example, ministers;
• the law must provide effective protection for fundamental human rights; and
• the rule of law requires states to comply with their obligations under international law as seriously as domestic ones.

The British government appears to violate all three of these particular principles in its decision to ban Palestine Action and criminalise anti-genocide demonstrators.

To begin at the beginning: there is no agreed definition of terrorism in international law and little academic consensus. The terrorism scholar Alex Schmid once suggested that terrorism might be considered “peacetime equivalents of war crimes.” That deliberately omits atrocities such as Hiroshima, Dresden or Gaza, but it is easy to see why governments responsible for mass civilian killings might resist such a definition that makes them seem at least terrorism adjacent.

In the absence of international agreement, terrorism becomes whatever individual governments decide it is. In the UK, the government has defined it broadly as violence against people and damage to property in pursuit of a political cause. Yet even by that standard, its application is arbitrary. The killing of close to 100,000 civilians by a UK ally is treated as legally too complex for ministers to judge, but the throwing of paint on a weapons system is not. To brand the latter vandalism as “terrorism” is to reduce the definition to a tool of political convenience — a textbook example of arbitrary discretion, and thus a breach of the rule of law.

This arbitrariness also undermines basic human rights protections, most clearly in the assault on the right to peaceful protest. On 6 September 2025, Steve Masters, a British military veteran, was arrested while sitting in his wheelchair in Parliament Square holding a poster. He was one of 890 people detained that day. Their “crime” was not violence, but conscience: holding placards in solidarity with Palestine Action. Farcically, many will be charged with terrorism offences.

What their protest reveals is the UK’s deeper breach: the failure to honour its obligations under international law, including its duty to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention. Training officers of a military engaged in mass civilian killings, and rolling out the red carpet for those officers’ political masters, cannot plausibly be described as discouragement of genocide.

Protesters hold up a mirror to the British government, and the government recoils from its reflection. Yet it is only the protesters who offer any hope that the UK might one day be able to face itself with any self-respect, once the atrocities with which it has been complicit have passed.