Hamas is using the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) to challenge its proscription as a terrorist organisation in the UK. The Telegraph has the story:
British lawyers acting on behalf of Hamas have submitted a 106-page legal application to Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, appealing against the Government’s designation of the organisation as terrorists.
It claims the ban breaches Hamas supporters’ human rights under the ECHR by “unlawfully restricting” their freedom of speech and rights to protest.
It also says it is disproportionate and claims Hamas poses “no threat to the UK people”, and that banning it breaches Britain’s obligations under international law to be “not complicit in a genocide”.
In 2021, Dame Priti Patel, then the home secretary, outlawed Hamas in its entirety as a terrorist organisation by adding its political wing. The Qassam Brigades, its military arm, had been proscribed two decades earlier.
The ban made it a criminal offence for anyone to belong to or invite support for Hamas, or wear clothing that could be seen to back the group. The maximum penalty is 14 years in prison.
Dame Priti, now the shadow foreign secretary, said the “evil Iranian-backed” group posed an “ongoing threat” to the UK’s security and to peace in the Middle East.
“Those campaigning to end the proscription of Hamas fail to understand the seriousness of the threats and danger this terrorist organisation poses,” she said.
“Eighteen months ago, Hamas carried out the worst terror attack in Israel’s history and the most murderous pogrom against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It continues to hold 59 innocent hostages in cruel captivity. Nobody should be in any doubt about the true nature and intentions of Hamas.”
The appeal, believed to be the first of its kind, is being fronted by Dr Mousa Abu Marzouk, Hamas’s head of international relations and its legal office. It was submitted by Fahad Ansari, the director of Riverway Law, a practice based in south London that is leading the challenge, and two London-based barristers.
One of the barristers, Daniel Grutters, of One Pump Court, represented pro-Palestinian students who set up a camp in LSE buildings last May before the university secured a court order barring them.
The lawyers involved in the case have said Hamas has not paid them or the experts and lawyers who provided evidence for its submission, as it was illegal to receive funds from a group designated as a terrorist organisation.
In a series of tweets, Riverway Law added that “nothing in these posts invites any individual to support, or express support for any proscribed organisation” listed by the Home Secretary under the Terrorism Act 2000. It said: “These posts are only to provide a summary of the legal application to summarise its significance.”
It set out three grounds for its appeal, including that proscription was “incompatible” with articles 10, 11 and 14 of the ECHR “because it unlawfully restricts the freedom of speech and assembly of those with whom the British state politically disagrees”.
Hamas said the proscription also hindered its ability to broker a political solution to the conflict, stifled conversations in securing a long-term political settlement and criminalised ordinary Palestinians living in Gaza.
Worth reading in full.
