More than 50 held as police move in on Palestine Action rally at Labour conference

More than 50 demonstrators have been arrested outside the Labour Party's annual conference in Liverpool, where a rally in support of the banned Palestine Action group was met by a large and carefully choreographed police operation, Merseyside Police have said.

The demonstration, staged under the banner of the Defend Our Juries campaign, drew a crowd of more than 250 people who sat down outside the conference centre. Many carried home-made banners carrying a single line of text: a declaration of support for the organisation. Because Palestine Action has been proscribed, officers said, holding such a sign is itself a criminal offence.

Photographs from the scene show officers in high-visibility jackets physically removing individual supporters, in one case leading a demonstrator away by the arm. Demonstrators gathered on the pavement as officers moved through the crowd, asking participants one by one whether they intended to continue displaying material in support of a proscribed organisation.

Those who confirmed that they would continue were taken away, police said, having been arrested under the Terrorism Act. Merseyside Police said officers were still in the process of making arrests on suspicion of wearing or carrying an article that supported a proscribed organisation, and that the total detained so far had passed 50.

A force spokesperson said officers respected the right of everyone to protest lawfully, while also seeking to keep the peace and protect the public. The spokesperson said the force had made "detailed and co-ordinated plans ahead of such events" so that its approach could be applied consistently, fairly and proportionately — language clearly designed to head off claims of arbitrary or selective policing.

The same spokesperson stressed that not everyone who attended the protest was committing a criminal offence, a distinction that appears designed to separate the broader crowd of demonstrators from the smaller group displaying pro-Palestine Action material that officers regarded as actionable.

The mood among the crowd was defiant rather than subdued: according to the report, protesters cheered each time an individual was carried away by police. What was, in effect, a public demonstration of support for a banned organisation became a rolling sequence of detentions, with the crowd treating each removal as a point of celebration rather than a defeat.

Rights groups were sharply critical of the operation. Amnesty International condemned the arrests, with Kerry Moscogiuri, the organisation's UK chief executive, saying that consecutive governments have been steadily eroding the ability of people to make their voices heard. She described the detention of "grandparents, teenagers and everyone in between" for holding placards outside a party conference as a shameful attack on freedom of speech, and asked whether the new prime minister, Andy Burnham, would reform the laws so that communities can come together and demonstrate on the issues they care about.

Among those detained was the human rights barrister Margaret Owen, aged 94 — a detail that critics and campaigners say captures what they consider the indiscriminate nature of the ban and its enforcement, given that she is far removed from any direct action attributed to the group.

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said organisers had hoped Mr Burnham, as the new prime minister, would scrap the proscription in light of the "weight of public pressure" to do so and the growing amount of public resource needed to police it. The spokesperson called the continued enforcement of the ban illogical, unsustainable and immoral.

The legal position remains unsettled. The ban came into force in July 2025, and it was confirmed in July this year that the proscription would be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The court said it had given permission for the group's co-founder to appeal the order, meaning the law itself is now under challenge at the country's highest court.

Responding to that decision at the time, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government would robustly defend the appeal. The Home Office has consistently maintained that the ban is not about protest in support of Palestinian causes, but was necessary because the organisation was causing significant criminal damage to legitimate businesses.

That justification has not resolved the judicial disagreement at the heart of the case. Both the High Court and the Court of Appeal have accepted that the group's activities have included criminal acts, but the judges were divided over whether those specific incidents were sufficient to justify resort to terrorism legislation — the very powers used to make the arrests in Liverpool.

The scale of the operation, and the presence of a 94-year-old barrister in the group detained, will add pressure to a debate that has already been running for more than a year, and will likely feature heavily in the Supreme Court's forthcoming ruling. It also raises practical questions about policing priorities, with officers required to identify and remove individual demonstrators in a crowd of several hundred rather than addressing a more conventional public-order threat. The BBC has asked the Ministry of Justice to comment.