Huda Ammori co-founded Palestine Action, a UK-based direct action group that targets companies it accuses of supplying arms and equipment to Israel, in 2020. She is now the named claimant fighting the UK government’s proscription of the organization in a case currently before the UK Supreme Court, which has granted permission to appeal in part and will hear argument in November. On August 26, 2026, when Ammori’s challenge was pending before the UK Supreme Court, the US Treasury designated Palestine Action a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224, citing its own finding that the group had materially supported an act of terrorism. Treasury’s announcement also stated plainly that the action “complements” the UK’s proscription of the group. One government treated another government’s contested finding as legitimating context for its own action, before the body best positioned to test that finding had finished testing it.

What the UK record actually shows

Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, proscribed Palestine Action in July 2025, days after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged two military aircraft, an incident Cooper cited as the culmination of an escalating pattern of criminal damage against defense-related targets, including facilities linked to Elbit Systems and the Thales factory in Glasgow. In February 2026, the Divisional Court of the High Court found the proscription unlawful on two grounds: that the Home Secretary had misapplied her own proscription policy, and that the decision was a disproportionate interference with Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the rights to free expression, assembly, and association. The court’s proportionality finding was specific. In the court’s own words, “a very small number of Palestine Action’s activities amounted to acts of terrorism,” and for those, ordinary criminal law remained available. The Court of Appeal reversed on both grounds in June 2026, holding that the Home Secretary had properly applied her policy and that proscription was, in fact, a proportionate response given the escalating nature of the group’s conduct. The UK Supreme Court has since granted permission to appeal, but only in part: permission was granted on whether the Home Secretary properly applied her own proscription policy, and refused on the separate question of whether proscription was a proportionate interference with Articles 10 and 11. The hearing is scheduled for November 4 to 5, 2026. The question that will actually reach the Supreme Court is narrower than the headlines suggest: not whether proscribing Palestine Action was a proportionate response to its conduct, since permission on that ground was refused, but whether the Home Secretary’s decision satisfied the constraints of the policy she herself had adopted. Even the Divisional Court accepted that some of Palestine Action’s conduct, including break-ins and property damage at defense-related sites like Brize Norton, met the statutory definition of terrorism.

A familiar pattern, not a new one

Regulators have reached for broad terrorism designations against Palestine-related civil society before. In October 2021, Israel’s Defense Ministry designated six Palestinian civil society organizations, including Al-Haq, Addameer, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees, as terrorist entities, despite the groups’ stated focus on human rights documentation, legal aid, and humanitarian advocacy. In April 2022, a group of UN human rights experts, including the Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, stated that Israel’s designation had not been accompanied by public, credible evidence. That July, nine European governments issued a joint statement confirming that “no substantial information was received from Israel that would justify reviewing our policy towards the six Palestinian NGOs.” The designation still had consequences regardless: assets seized by Israel, restricted operations, years of organizations working under a label nine governments and multiple UN experts found unsubstantiated.

The gendered mechanism, not just the gendered outcome

The Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin’s earlier work supplies the framework for why this pattern falls unevenly. Her 2019 report to the Human Rights Council, predating the Israeli designation by two years, found that “women’s organisations, which tend to be smaller and more informal, have been significantly more affected” by the increased administrative requirements that counter-terrorism measures impose. The same report separately documents that financial institutions’ counter-terrorism compliance measures have led to refused or delayed banking services and refused or closed accounts for civil society organizations more broadly, a related but distinct consequence. Together they describe organizations with less capacity to absorb administrative burden and financial disruption, and the report specifically identifies women’s organizations as bearing more of that weight. The Union of Palestinian Women Committees was not a peripheral casualty of the 2021 designation; it was a concrete instance of a vulnerability the Special Rapporteur had already documented. The same Rapporteur’s Global Study on counter-terrorism and civil society was built, in its own words, “with a commitment to mainstream gender equality and women’s rights from its inception.”

What November actually decides

The UK Supreme Court will not revisit whether proscribing Palestine Action was a proportionate response to its conduct. Permission on that ground was refused. What remains live is narrower, and still unresolved: whether the Home Secretary complied with her own stated policy when she decided to proscribe the group in the first place, the same ground on which the Divisional Court ruled against her and the Court of Appeal ruled for her. That question will not be finally settled until November at the earliest, more than two months after the US Treasury cited the underlying proscription in an action of its own, treating it, at least implicitly, as settled.

The US designation carries its own separate consequences, and they reach further than the UK case alone. It blocks any Palestine Action property or financial interests under US jurisdiction and generally prohibits US persons from transactions with the group, with willful violations carrying separate civil and criminal penalties under US sanctions law, exposure that now falls on US-based supporters and donors even though Palestine Action has no formal US chapter. Treasury’s own stated basis leaned in part on the group’s online promotion of its tactics, which it said had encouraged similar activity “within the United States and along the U.S.-Mexican border,” a considerably thinner domestic nexus than the years of UK prosecutions the Home Secretary’s proscription rests on. The two designations, in other words, are not equivalent findings; one borrows credibility from the other without matching its evidentiary record.

Ammori has been litigating this since 2025, through one court after another, while the United States, the one other government to act on the underlying designation, moved ahead as though the question it rested on were not still hers to win or lose.