Margaret Owen, a 94-year-old Jewish human rights barrister, was arrested on Saturday at a protest in Liverpool held in support of Palestine Action, the activist group Britain banned as a terrorist organization last year.
Ms. Owen was one of more than 50 people detained at the Sept. 27 demonstration, which was organized by Defend Our Juries, a campaign against the proscription, according to the International Business Times. More than 250 protesters had sat outside a conference center in the city, and footage from the demonstration showed elderly and disabled protesters being detained. The BBC reported the arrests, which Amnesty International called a “shameful attack on freedom of speech.”
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Ms. Owen, a friend of the late mother of Ed Miliband, now Britain’s energy secretary, said she had spent months trying to get arrested. She has attended about a dozen protests in London wearing a sign reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” A placard with the same words has hung in a window of her home since July 2025, when the government proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, making expressions of support for the group a criminal offense.
Enforcement of the ban has been broad. More than 2,200 people had been arrested by January for alleged support of the group, many of them for carrying placards or attending demonstrations, according to an analysis by a legal scholar at the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Association. Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, called the ban a “disturbing” misuse of counterterrorism legislation.
The police force behind the Liverpool operation told the BBC it had made “detailed and co-ordinated plans ahead of such events to ensure it can apply this consistently, fairly and proportionately,” and said not everyone present at the protest had committed a criminal offence.