In an article for the Daily Record, former SNP First Minister Humza Yousaf argues that non-violent support of the banned group should not be prosecuted.
Scottish Government minister and MSP for Glasgow region whose interests include tackling mental health stigma, poverty, civil liberties and issues affecting young people.
Former First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf.
Award winning screenwriter Paul Laverty was arrested in Edinburgh last week, reportedly under the Terrorism Act, for the “crime” of wearing a T-shirt that referenced Palestine Action.
He was outside St Leonard’s police station supporting another protester due to be charged for a similar “offence.” This is a celebrated writer, Ken Loach’s long-time collaborator on I, Daniel Blake and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, detained because his shirt expressed opposition to a genocide and solidarity with those demanding it end.
Laverty’s arrest is not an isolated incident. Since the government proscribed Palestine Action in July, more than 700 people have been arrested across the UK. Priests, professors and people of all walks and backgrounds arrested for carrying placards reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
The Government’s moral compass needs seriously recalibrated when we live in a country where people are arrested under terrorism legislation for protesting against a genocide, meanwhile, the UK continues to provide support to the regime that is committing the very genocide people are opposing.
The UK Government has only suspended 10% of arms licences to Israel, leaving 90% of export licences untouched, including the F-35 supply chain. When non-violent Scots are handcuffed for a slogan, and the state keeps shipping components to a military campaign that has levelled neighbourhoods, starved families and killed children, you can forgive people for concluding that we are living through an episode of Black Mirror.
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Need we remind ourselves what people are protesting against? A catastrophe almost too big to name. Gaza’s death toll has passed 62,000 according to UN-cited health data, with over 17,000 children among the dead.
Every day, we are witnessing war crime, after war crime being live-streamed in real-time. Last week we saw footage of a double-tap strike on Nasser Hospital, killing journalists and medics as rescuers rushed in after the first blast. We are living through a time in which hospitals are hit twice and those who protest these atrocities are treated as terrorists. If this is law, then the law is an ass.
The phrase “the law is an ass” was popularised by Dickens, in Oliver Twist when Mr Bumble complains about a legal presumption that a wife acts under her husband’s direction: “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass – a idiot.” The phrase goes back even earlier, to a 17th-century play, but Dickens made it immortal precisely because it captures something we feel in our bones when rules become blind to justice. The sentiment is as true now in the case of proscribing Palestine Action as it was in the 17th Century.
In Scotland, we have an immediate, practical way to demonstrate that we will not partake in the charade of treating non-violent protestors as terrorist sympathisers. Earlier this year, the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, published a prosecution policy for Glasgow’s safer drug consumption room. She concluded it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people for simple possession within the facility. That was a humane and evidence-based judgment, and one I support.
I have written to the Lord Advocate today asking her to adopt a similar public interest policy: that peaceful protestors who merely express support for Palestine Action should not be prosecuted under counter-terror laws.
Amnesty International have made a strong legal case for why the counter-terror laws applied to Palestine Action are unlawful. Under our human-rights obligations, any restriction on expression and assembly must be lawful, necessary and proportionate to a legitimate aim. Criminalising a placard that does not incite violence fails that test. The European Court of Human Rights is clear: robust political speech – even harsh, unsettling or unpopular – sits at the core of Article 10 protection.
Treating non-violent citizens as terrorists for a slogan is not proportionate policing; it is an abuse of extraordinary powers against ordinary people. George Orwell wrote that “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” In Scotland we have a chance to prove those words still mean something. Let’s make it clear that we will protect freedom of speech, especially speech that calls for an end to the mass slaughter of innocents, and that we will not waste precious public resources criminalising conscience.
Let’s make a statement, as a nation, that we stand with those who stand for life.
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