At 94, a Jewish Human Rights Lawyer Finally Gets Arrested for Backing Palestine Action

Margaret Owen had spent months trying to get detained. On Sunday, the 94-year-old Jewish human rights barrister finally got her wish when police in Liverpool placed her in a van during a protest outside the Labour Party conference.

Owen, a recipient of the Order of the British Empire for her work advancing women's rights, had attended roughly a dozen demonstrations carrying a sign that read "I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action." The same words have hung in a window of her London home since the UK government proscribed the group under the Terrorism Act in July 2025.

"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."

Her arrest came during a rally organized by Defend Our Juries, a UK activist group campaigning to overturn the ban on Palestine Action. Merseyside Police said 82 people were detained at the protest on suspicion of wearing or carrying an article supporting a proscribed organization. All were later released on bail.

Owen's path to detention was unusually deliberate. She wrote to the Metropolitan Police, attaching photographs of herself and effectively confessing to the offense, but said officers took no action. She believes her age and profile made her an inconvenient arrest for London police, who may have feared the media attention a nonagenarian human rights lawyer would attract.

"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," she said. "Maybe they'd never heard of me, the police up in Liverpool."

The Metropolitan Police declined to discuss Owen's case directly but told Al Jazeera that in London, officers may not have witnessed an offense or the circumstances may not have met the legal threshold for arrest at the time.

Owen said her motivation for seeking detention was strategic. She argued that when legal professionals participate in civil disobedience, it lends the campaign a measure of authority and credibility that helps expose what critics call the misuse of counterterrorism legislation.

Founded in 2020, Palestine Action describes its mission as countering Israeli war crimes and British complicity in them by targeting weapons manufacturers and associated companies. Its principal target has been Elbit Systems, Israel's largest arms company, which operates several facilities in the UK. Several people who took part in raids claimed by the group are currently imprisoned, with some sentenced under terrorism provisions.

The ban has produced a wave of arrests across Britain. Many of those detained for expressing support are pensioners, most of them held for carrying signs bearing the same seven words as Owen's placard. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, vicars, magistrates, a former adviser to King Charles and a member of the band Massive Attack number among the diverse group of detainees.

Tim Crossland, a co-leader of Defend Our Juries and a former government lawyer, is among those involved in the campaign. The organization has framed the ban as an assault on the right to peaceful protest and has demanded that the government reverse it.

The political context has shifted since the ban was imposed. Just 10 lawmakers voted against the proscription in the House of Commons, compared with 276 in favor. Then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper dismissed warnings from campaign groups, the United Nations human rights chief and leading politicians and peers that the move misused counterterrorism legislation.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband recently struck a different tone, telling LBC radio that he believes in the right to peaceful protest and that criminalizing elderly people and Christian leaders was not anyone's intent. His comments, like his announcement of sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements, marked a departure from his predecessors under then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Owen's personal history adds texture to her activism. She was a close friend of the late mother of Ed Miliband, a connection she acknowledged while expressing admiration for the foreign secretary. In 2013, she received the OBE for her contribution to advancing women's human rights, particularly the rights of widows around the world.

A legal challenge to the ban is now before the Supreme Court, and Miliband said he would let that process play out rather than comment further. For Owen, the court case and the broader campaign represent a continuation of a lifetime spent using the law to challenge what she views as injustice.

"I believe in the right to peaceful protest," she said, echoing the foreign secretary's words while making clear that her own protest would continue regardless of the legal outcome. At 94, she has now joined the ranks of those arrested under a law she considers fundamentally wrong.