Legal complaint filed by Palestine activists against Met Police chief over synagogue remarks
Pro-Palestinian supporters hold placards and wave flags on Downing Street in central London on 19 July 2025
Middle East Eye reports on 6 May 2026:
A coalition of campaign groups has made a formal complaint against the head of London’s Metropolitan Police for suggesting that protest organisers repeatedly intended to include synagogues on their planned demonstration routes in London.
In recent interviews with The Times and ITV News, Mark Rowley, the police commissioner, has suggested that pro-Palestine demonstration organisers have sought to march past synagogues.
“The fact that features as the organisers’ intent, I think that sends a message … that feels like antisemitism,” he told The Times.
On ITV, he said: “They set out with an intent to march near synagogues etc and every single time that we put conditions on to prevent that.”
On Wednesday, Hodge Jones & Allen solicitors wrote to the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime on behalf of its client, the Palestine Coalition. The coalition is made up of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Palestinian Forum of Britain, the Stop the War Coalition, Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Muslim Association of Britain and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The complaint stated that the similarity of Rowley’s two interviews demonstrated that his comments were not inadvertent, they “were intentional, and made to undermine and stigmatise the marches that our Client has been involved in organising for many years”.
It said that the marches since October 2023 were to protest against Israeli violations of international law against Palestinians and British complicity in such acts.
The complaint referenced expectations for the conduct of the commissioner as set out in the police conduct regulations of 2020, which requires the chief to act with honesty and integrity, treat people with respect and courtesy, not abuse authority, act with fairness and impartiality and not undermine public confidence in the police. “The Commissioner’s comments were in breach of those standards,” the complaint alleges.
It said that it was factually incorrect to suggest that its client had set out with intent to march near synagogues as an objective.
‘Racially discriminatory’
Some of the planned marches had gone past major landmarks, and been in the vicinity of synagogues and other places of worship, the complaint said, “but they have never deliberately been routed past or near such synagogues, as suggested”.