Jewish human rights barrister, 94, arrested for supporting Palestine Action

London, United Kingdom – Margaret Owen, a 94-year-old Jewish human rights barrister, has been trying to get arrested for months.

She has attended about a dozen protests wearing a sign reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” in London and has had a placard with those words attached to a window at her home since the group was proscribed under the Terrorism Act in the UK in July 2025.

But unlike thousands of others who have been detained for showing support for Palestine Action, officers had not – until Sunday – hauled her into a police van.

“I’ve been trying to get arrested for quite some time,” she told Al Jazeera. “I’m rather proud and glad to have finally joined the club.”

In her pursuit, Owen had also written to the Metropolitan Police, sharing photos and confessing, but “they’ve never done anything about it”.

“I think they never wanted to arrest me because that would be quite a story for the media, this ancient veteran human rights lawyer, aged 94, you know, it’s too much of a story.”

In Liverpool, during a rally held outside the Labour conference, she was finally detained.

“I was the oldest there … Maybe they’d never heard of me, the police up in Liverpool,” said Owen, who in 2013 received an OBE for her contribution to advancing women’s human rights, especially widows’.

Merseyside Police said 82 people were arrested in the same protest “on suspicion of wearing/carrying an article supporting a proscribed organisation” and have since been released on bail.

The Metropolitan Police did not comment on Owen specifically, but told Al Jazeera that, in London, “officers may not have witnessed an offence being committed, or the circumstances may not have met the necessary legal threshold for an arrest at that time”.

Owen said she wanted to be detained because the involvement of legal professionals lends a growing civil disobedience campaign “some sort of authority”.

The rallies have been organised by Defend Our Juries, a UK-based activist group demanding the UK lifts the ban on Palestine Action.

Founded in 2020, Palestine Action’s stated objective has been to counter Israeli war crimes – and what it says is British complicity in them – by targeting weapons manufacturers and associated companies. Its main target is Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms company, which has several facilities in the UK.

Several people who participated in raids claimed by Palestine Action are in jail, some having been sentenced as “terrorists”.

‘I admire Ed Miliband’

Many of those who have been arrested for showing support are pensioners, overwhelmingly for holding signs with the same seven words as the ones on Owen’s placard.

Doctors, teachers, lawyers, vicars, magistrates (many of them retired), a former adviser to King Charles and a Massive Attack singer are also among the diverse group, as is Tim Crossland, a coleader of Defend Our Juries and former government lawyer.

“I believe in the right to peaceful protest,” Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband recently told LBC radio. “I don’t think it was anyone’s intent to have those people criminalised,” he added, referring to the elderly and Christian leaders who have been detained.

As with the sanctions he announced against illegal Israeli settlements, his comments marked a departure from his predecessors.

Before Labour’s change of guard, few lawmakers under then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticised Israel’s conduct or the ban on Palestine Action. Just 10 voted against it in the House of Commons, compared with 276 for.

Then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper ignored warnings from campaign groups, the United Nations human rights chief and leading politicians and peers that the move misused counterterrorism legislation.

“On the specific issue of Palestine Action, there’s a case coming before the Supreme Court, and so I’ll let that case play out, because I think it’s important that that court process takes its course,” Miliband told LBC.

He was referring to another case expected this year; Palestine Action’s cofounder Huda Ammori has been given permission to challenge the ban at the UK’s highest court.

Miliband, who is Jewish, has credited his late mother’s influence when explaining the UK’s new policies sanctioning Israel as it continues a genocidal campaign in Gaza.

“I admire and love Ed Miliband,” said Owen, who has a personal connection to the foreign secretary. She was “great friends” with Marion Kozak, his mother, a Holocaust survivor whose funeral she attended in July.

Kozak had “always been for the Palestinian people; she recognised the terrible Nakba of 1948”, said Owen, adding Miliband’s mother was moved by the plight “before many of us”.

‘I began to see how authoritarian Israel was’

Owen was born in 1932 to a family that also shouldered a painful history.

Her two great aunts and other relatives were killed in the Holocaust, “murdered in the forests of Paneriai in 1941 outside Vilnius”.

Her father was a lawyer and her mother, a doctor.

They were “very good parents”, she said. “I’m sure my mother would have been protesting like mad as well.”

Having studied law at the University of Cambridge, she qualified as a barrister at a time when the education system and legal profession were “very anti-women”. There were just two women studying law in her year, she said.

She later travelled to Israel for nine months, but after just three, “I began to see how authoritarian it was.”

“I began to see that whole indoctrination.”

She also remembered “how discriminate it was to all sorts of people, particularly the Black Jews, they called them, coming from Northern Africa”.

Along with her brother, who travelled with her, “we were questioning the Balfour Declaration”.

“[The experience] made me very, very critical of Israel even from 1956 onwards.”

Throughout her career, she has worked on legal cases across the world.

In late December, Owen will learn more about her own case, whether she will be charged over her show of solidarity for Palestine Action.

“I’m afraid I’m not the terrorist,” she said. “But Israel is a terrorist state, and we are complicit in supporting a terrorist state.”