The Weekly Round Up: Palestine Action’s Proscription Upheld, a Strasbourg First on Nagorno-Karabakh, and Human Rights in the Iran Peace Deal
22 June 2026
In the News
The UK equality watchdog reports to the UN on race
On Thursday, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published the report it had submitted in May to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), under the Committee’s follow-up procedure.
After its last full review of the United Kingdom in 2024, the Committee had asked for evidence of progress in three areas: the right to peaceful assembly, the Windrush generation, and counter-terrorism.
On peaceful assembly, the Commission found that the cumulative expansion of police powers across the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023 and the Crime and Policing Act 2026 had placed mounting restrictions on the right to protest, and recommended that the legislation be amended to recognise a positive duty to facilitate peaceful protest. On counter-terrorism, while noting the recent reforms to Prevent, it pressed for stronger oversight against discriminatory application of the Prevent duty and for the publication of referral data broken down by race, ethnicity, religion and nationality. On Windrush, it called for better funding of the Windrush Compensation Advocacy Support Fund.
The Committee will consider the UK’s follow-up at its session in August. The report came a day after the Commission set out its latest equality objectives under the public sector equality duty.
Human rights and the Iran peace deal
On Friday, a group of independent UN experts welcomed the signing of a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran, intended to draw a line under months of conflict, but warned that any settlement which ignored the human rights situation inside Iran would be “fundamentally incomplete”. The Memorandum, they observed, is concerned almost wholly with military withdrawal, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear question, sanctions relief and a $300 billion reconstruction fund; the Iranian people, the experts said, must be heard in any negotiation that claims to secure their future.
Earlier in the week, two UN special rapporteurs voiced grave concern for a British couple wrongfully detained in Iran, both by then on hunger strike: one for more than thirty days, the other for more than twenty.
In the Courts
R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department: Palestine Action’s proscription upheld
On Monday, the Court of Appeal handed down its judgment in R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWCA Civ 721, upholding the proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000. A five-judge Court — comprised of the Lady Chief Justice (Lady Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill CJ), the Master of the Rolls (Sir Geoffrey Vos), the Vice President of the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division (Edis LJ) and Lewis and Whipple LLJ — allowed the Home Secretary’s appeal, holding that the ban was a lawful and proportionate interference with the rights to freedom of expression and assembly under Articles 10 and 11 of the Convention.
Founded in 2020, Palestine Action’s principal target has been Elbit Systems UK, the British arm of the Israeli arms manufacturer, with the aim of disrupting the Israeli arms trade in Britain. After an escalating campaign of property damage — including at Thales in Glasgow, Instro Precision in Kent and Elbit Systems in Bristol, and, days before the decision, the breaking into RAF Brize Norton and the spray-painting of two military aircraft — the then Home Secretary announced the proscription to Parliament on 23 June 2025. It took effect on 5 July 2025, making it an offence under sections 11 and 12 of the Act to belong to, or invite support for, the organisation, punishable on indictment by up to fourteen years’ imprisonment.
In February, the Divisional Court ([2026] EWHC 292 (Admin)) had quashed the proscription on two grounds: first, that the Home Secretary had acted inconsistently with her own published policy by taking into account that proscription would give the authorities “additional levers to disrupt” the group’s operations; second, applying the four-stage test in Bank Mellat v HM Treasury (No 2) [2014] AC 700, the group’s qualifying activity had not reached the scale needed to justify the interference with Articles 10 and 11.
The Court of Appeal disagreed on both points. The Proscription Policy was a short, open-textured document whose list of relevant factors was not exhaustive and was never meant to fetter the Home Secretary’s discretion; the disruptive effects of proscription went to its efficacy and were a legitimate part of the proportionality balance. More fundamentally, the Divisional Court had afforded the executive too little latitude and had drawn the factual picture too narrowly, gauging the threat by reference only to the handful of incidents that met the statutory definition of terrorism, in isolation from Palestine Action’s wider conduct: its escalation, recruitment and fundraising, and the covert, cell-based model described in its own “Underground Manual”. The assessment of future risk to national security, the Court held, is pre-eminently a matter for the executive, which is better placed than a court to weigh it and entitled to a wide margin of respect. Once the fuller picture was restored, the Bank Mellat balance fell in favour of the ban: its objectives were sufficiently important and rationally connected to it, no adequate less intrusive measure had been identified, and a fair balance had been struck, notwithstanding the “chilling effect” the Court acknowledged the proscription might have on the significant number of people who wish to voice support for the Palestinian cause by wholly lawful means.
The quashing order is accordingly set aside and the proscription stands: expressions of support for Palestine Action remain capable of constituting a terrorism offence, and the ongoing prosecutions continue. Ms Ammori has said that she will seek permission to appeal to the Supreme Court and, if necessary, to Strasbourg.
V.T. and Others v Azerbaijan: a Strasbourg first on the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
On Thursday, in its first judgment arising from the “Four-Day War” of April 2016, the First Section of the European Court of Human Rights found Azerbaijan responsible for the torture and unlawful killing of an ethnic Armenian serviceman. The case is V.T. and Others v. Azerbaijan (app. no. 20075/16).
The three applicants — the parents and sister of the deceased, an officer in the army of the then unrecognised “Nagorno-Karabakh Republic” (referred to by the Court as H.T.) — said that he had been captured alive, mutilated and killed during the fighting, his body recovered near the village of Talish.
The Court found violations of Article 2 (right to life) and Article 3 (the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment), each in its substantive limb. He had, it held, been killed when already hors de combat: conduct the Court observed was also contrary to international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions. The mutilated condition in which his remains were returned, which prevented his family from giving him a complete burial, had itself caused them suffering contrary to Article 3. It awarded €60,000 jointly to the parents and €30,000 to the sister in non-pecuniary damages, with a further €14,210 in costs.
The judgment is the first arising out of the 2016 fighting, with twenty-one similar applications still pending in Strasbourg. Azerbaijan, which disputes the Court’s jurisdiction, is expected to reject the judgment.
Tuncer Çetinkaya v. Türkiye: a Zaman journalist and the post-coup detentions
On Tuesday, the Second Section returned to the detention of journalists in the aftermath of the July 2016 attempted coup, in Tuncer Çetinkaya v. Türkiye (app. no. 79795/17) (judgment available only in French).
The applicant, the former regional representative of the newspaper Zaman in Antalya, was remanded in custody on 26 July 2016 on suspicion of membership of the organisation the authorities designate “FETÖ/PDY”. The Court found violations of Article 5(1) (no reasonable suspicion to justify the initial detention), Article 5(3) (the length of his pre-trial detention) and Article 10 (freedom of expression).
CNEWS v. France: no Article 10 violation for the news channel
On Thursday, by contrast, the Fifth Section found no violation of Article 10 in a complaint brought by the operator of the French news channel CNEWS (CNEWS v. France, app. no. 41355/23) (judgment available only in French). It should not be confused with a domestic development of the same week: on 15 June, the French broadcasting regulator, ARCOM, made public a formal notice of its decision dated 12 June requiring CNEWS to comply with its pluralism obligations, following a complaint lodged in January by Reporters Without Borders.
Ottlakán v. Hungary: an illusory remedy for poor prison conditions
On Tuesday, the Second Section found a violation of Article 13 (the right to an effective remedy) read with Article 3 in Ottlakán v. Hungary (app. no. 17201/23). The applicant, a whole-life prisoner with no prospect of release, had been awarded some €1,500 in the domestic courts for 488 days spent in cells below the statutory minimum of four square metres of personal space. That remedy was inadequate: the money was set aside in an account administered by the prison until his release and, because no mechanism could ever lead to this prisoner’s release, he had no real prospect of receiving it.
Iskrenović v. Serbia: insulting the police, and the right to examine witnesses
Finally, on Tuesday the Third Section found a violation of Article 6(1) read with Article 6(3)(d) (the right to obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses) in Iskrenović v. Serbia (app. no. 39427/23), in the case of a man convicted, in minor-offence proceedings, of insulting police officers in the performance of their duties.
On the UKHRB
This week, Jonathan Metzer takes an extended look at the Court of Appeal’s reasoning in Ammori, examining in greater detail the treatment of the Home Secretary’s proscription policy, the four-stage Bank Mellat analysis, the wide margin afforded to the executive in matters of national security, and the Court’s conclusion that Palestine Action could not properly be characterised as a non-violent civil-disobedience protest group.
