17 Aug 2026 Policing Solidarity Follow up: The Ulm 5 Trial and the Palestine Action Ban

Posted at 12:03h in Corporate Governance, Human rights, Weapons by

Since our July report Policing Solidarity on the treatment of expressions of solidarity with Palestine in Germany and the United Kingdom, recent developments have added weight to the concerns raised there regarding the use of terrorist and criminal organisation charges against activists organisations and individuals as emblematic of a wider erosion of rule of law. In Germany, the trial of the “Ulm 5” has continued to escalate in ways that their defence lawyers, family members, and foreign diplomats increasingly describe as incompatible with a fair trial, whereas in the UK, Palestine Action’s co-founder has won the right to challenge the group’s terrorism proscription at the Supreme Court, even as the first criminal trial of individual Palestine Action activists has ended in prison terms for four activists and the first ever conviction of criminal damage as a terrorism offence. This update sets out to explore what has changed, and why it matters that security-oriented legal tools are increasingly being redirected against political dissent in ways that strain the solidity of rule of law in both countries.

The Ulm 5: a trial that keeps getting harder to follow

On 8 September 2025, five Berlin-based pro-Palestinian activists, named Daniel, Crow, Leandra, Zo and Vi, entered a factory belonging to a German subsidiary of , an Israeli arms manufacturer, in Ulm. They damaged equipment and spray-painted slogans on the premises, then waited for the police to arrive and were taken in for investigation. They have been held in pre-trial detention ever since, a measure justified on the grounds of flight risk, even though none of them resisted arrest and all five are settled residents of Berlin. The five activists face charges of a serious breach of public peace, serious property damage, the use of forbidden symbols (the slogan “From the River to the Sea” is treated by prosecutors as a symbol of Hamas), and most consequentially, they are charged with forming a criminal organisation under Section 129 of the German Criminal Code, in relation to the group Palestine Action Germany. As our original report noted, Section 129 has a history as a political tool in Germany, deployed against climate activists in the last decade, and now against pro-Palestinian activists. Adding the criminal-organisation charge raises the potential sentence from three to five years, and it also criminalises anyone who could be construed as a supporter of the group in question, such as audience members at the trial, friends, and family. The practical effect is to help create an atmosphere of fear around association with the movement, a dynamic that closely parallels the UK’s terrorism-based proscription of Palestine Action, discussed below.

The trial of the Ulm 5 opened on 1 April 2026, and almost everything about how it has been conducted since has become a point of contention. From the first session, heavily armoured guards have been present in the courtroom, and the defendants have entered in handcuffs (after also being cuffed for the duration of the transport to court), which are only removed once the judge and court are in session. They are also re-cuffed every time the judge leaves the room. The defence asked for this practice to be changed and was refused, without the court giving a reason. Repeated and prolonged cuffing has left the defendants’ wrists bruised- after the lawyers protested a second time, one defendant was subsequently seen wearing cushioned cuffs- one of the very few concessions the judge has granted.

The defendants are seated in a glass box behind their own defence lawyers for the duration of proceedings, which the defence says makes it impossible for them to communicate during the trial. Lawyers have asked, first, to sit next to their clients, and second, for the glass separation to be removed so that consultation is possible, but the judge has denied both requests. In response to the glass box being upheld, the defence lawyers announced a motion of recusal against the entire chamber, including the judge, arguing a repeated infringement of the right to a defence. The court has since announced further dates that extend the trial into 2027. Because the defence must leave the courtroom each time they need to confer with their clients, proceedings have slowed considerably, evidenced in the fact that in ten days of court sessions, only one witness had been heard. The defence continues to argue that seating the accused in a glass box is not standard practice and effectively renders them mute spectators at their own trial, turning it, in their characterisation, into a show trial, and that the defendants’ inability to follow the proceedings in full amounts to a breach of Article 6 of the EU convention on Human Rights.

Treatment of the accused inside the courtroom has also drawn allegations of abuse. After defence lawyers filed complaints of sexual abuse on behalf of the all the women members of the Ulm 5, relating to body searches conducted by a particular officer on one court date, the men reported sexual harassment during body searches by an officer at the next session. Around sixteen police officers are typically present in the courtroom itself, wearing reinforced gloves and trousers, stab vests, and carrying batons – a presence the defence has objected to as creating an atmosphere of violence. The court has responded that this reflects the “high emotional atmosphere” of the proceedings, despite this ruling by the court having been made before anyone had ever entered the courtroom.

The choice of venue compounds these concerns. The trial is being held at the Stammheim prison complex in Stuttgart, in the building immediately next to the site where Red Army Faction members were tried for terrorism in the 1970s, a proximity that, as our original report noted, evokes a deliberate parallel. The courtroom building sits behind barbed wire and guards as part of the prison complex, and entry requires passing through security scans.

A further escalation came with the confiscation of stationary. Starting with the court dates of 20 and 22 May, pens, paper, and even notes already taken by journalists and other members of the public in attendance were being confiscated. The court justified this by citing the “tense atmosphere” in the courthouse, with the implication that pens could function as possible weapons. The defence, noting that the audience was made up largely of the defendants’ friends and family, and that the defendants themselves are seated behind glass, has called the measure absurd and argued that it violates the principle of public access to trials.

Conditions of detention have drawn some of the sharpest criticism. The five are held at separate facilities, preventing any contact between them, and bail has been denied to each of them individually. They are barred from discussing the trial with their families. All books, conversations, visits, and letters are subject to surveillance, with the sole exception of privileged communication with their lawyers – a regime justified under Section 129 (the criminal organisation charges). Conditions vary by facility but are consistently severe.

Daniel, an Irish citizen among the Ulm 5 was for several months held behind a glass partition even during family visits, a practice later described by the authorities as a bureaucratic mistake. It changed only after Irish ambassadors met with German government representatives and prosecutors subsequently reviewed the paperwork. The Irish ambassadors, who were not permitted to discuss the case itself with the Ulm 5, said they found that restriction unusual, and separately criticised the broader detention conditions, calling for independent observers to be present at future court dates.

At the point of arrest, all five were held in underground cells for 30 hours by police, many of them in their underwear, while their lawyers attempted without success to gain access. In court, this was defended on the grounds that the five had been offered access to police-appointed lawyers during that initial period. When they declined and asked for their own legal representation instead, access was refused regardless – a practice the defence maintains is unlawful, and which the court has yet to address.

Asked what she believed the trial was really intended to achieve, a family member of one of the accused put it directly: “To paint these 5 people, who (…) made huge efforts to ensure that nobody was hurt, to present them as a danger to the public. They need to do this in order to justify Germany’s current policy in relation to Israel and the Genocide”. The Irish delegation that observed part of the trial also raised rule-of-law concerns directly with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who defended the conduct of the proceedings.

Palestine Action UK: a Supreme Court challenge, arrests, and the first terrorism convictions

As covered previously, Palestine Action UK was banned by the government in 2025 under terrorism legislation. That decision was challenged and found unlawful by the High Court in London in February 2026, only for the Court of Appeal to reaffirm the proscription in June 2026. On 30 July 2026, it became public that Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori had been granted permission to challenge the ban at the Supreme Court, with the appeal expedited to be heard after the summer.

On the same day, UK police arrested 77 people at a rally held outside a courthouse in London in support of Palestine Action – the first protest of this kind to take place under the new government led by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who succeeded Keir Starmer earlier in the summer.

Earlier in July, the first criminal trial of individuals affiliated with Palestine Action UK concluded. The defendants, a group of activists referred to as the Filton 25, had taken part in a direct-action protest at an Elbit Systems factory in Filton that caused an estimated £1.2 million in property damage and left one police officer injured. Four of the activists – Samuel Corner, Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio and Fatema Rajwani -were convicted and received prison sentences ranging from four years and eight months to eight years and eight months. The case is understood to be the first in which property damage alone has resulted in a terrorism conviction.

The defendants’ barrister told the court that a terrorism ruling in this context “undermines the integrity of the criminal justice system and amounts to chilling and creeping authoritarianism.” Several Labour MPs also publicly criticised the severity of the sentences in the verdict’s aftermath.

That same barrister, Rajiv Menon KC, is now separately entangled in the case: The jury that convicted his client, Charlotte Head, and her co-defendants was never told that a terrorism-linked sentence could follow their verdict; only after they were found guilty of criminal damage did the trial judge rule that the offence carried a “terrorism connection” and sentence them accordingly – the first time in UK legal history that criminal damage alone has attracted a terrorism enhancement.

Menon, who had represented Head in that trial, now faces proceedings for contempt of court over the closing speech he gave to the jury in January 2026 – understood to be the first time in English legal history that a barrister has faced contempt proceedings over the content of a closing speech. No court has found Menon in contempt; a judge referred the question after ruling the speech breached his directions not to raise the war in Gaza or the concept of jury equity, and the case has since been paused twice by the Court of Appeal on jurisdictional grounds, with a hearing now expected in September 2026. Senior legal figures, including the chair of the Bar Council and the Criminal Bar Association, have warned that prosecuting a barrister over courtroom advocacy risks a chilling effect on defence lawyers more broadly – a bar first kept in the dark on sentencing consequences, then punished for how it argued against them.

Taken together, and seen in the context of the original report Policing Solidarity, these developments reinforce rather than complicate the picture: in both Germany and the UK, legal architecture originally built for other purposes (anti-organised-crime statutes, counter-terrorism law) continues to be applied to pro-Palestinian direct action in ways that produce disproportionate pre-trial detention, courtroom conditions that impede a fair defence, and sentencing outcomes with few or no precedents. The Ulm 5 trial, now extending into 2027, and the Filton 25 sentences, the first time property damage alone has met the threshold for a UK terrorism conviction, both suggest that the trend we identified in July has not slowed. If anything, the involvement of foreign diplomats such as the Irish ambassadors’ interventions in Germany, and Ireland’s earlier public concern about the Ulm 5 case reaching the level of the German chancellor, signals that these cases are increasingly being read internationally as tests of rule of law, not simply as domestic protest-policing matters.

For further information on Ulm 5 see the following links:

For further information on Palestine Action UK see the following links:

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