Palestine protest organisers found guilty of breaching police restrictions
Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal (L-R), photographed outside Westminster magistrates court on 1 April 2026 after being found guilty of breaking protest restrictions
Areeb Ullah reports in Middle East Eye on 1 April 2026:
Two prominent organisers of demonstrations in support of Palestine in the UK have been found guilty of breaking police restrictions following their arrest during a protest against the war in Gaza in central London in January.
Chris Nineham, 62, the Stop the War Coalition’s vice-chair, and Ben Jamal, 61, chair of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, were found guilty at Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday of two counts of breaking the Public Order Act.
The activists were arrested during a pro-Palestine rally after police had imposed late restrictions limiting the event to a static protest after previously approving the route of a planned march to the BBC proposed by organisers months in advance.
Organisers denied the Metropolitan Police’s claim that protesters had forced their way through a police cordon after ending their protest in Whitehall.
Footage taken by Middle East Eye showed police officers in riot gear surrounding Nineham and bundling him into the back of a police van after a small group of protesters left Whitehall to lay flowers in Trafalgar Square to mark the deaths of Palestinian children.
District Judge Daniel Sternberg, delivering the judgment on Wednesday after a three-day trial, said: “The court emphasised that protest rights, while fundamental, are not absolute and do not permit breaching lawfully imposed restrictions.”
Sternberg added that the conditions imposed by the police were “lawful” and noted a speech made by Jamal after the march “constituted incitement” of the crowd. “Mr Jamal’s speech constituted incitement: it was a suggestion, persuasion, and inducement encouraging breach of the condition,” said Sternberg. “The commander acted under valid statutory powers and applied the correct test. The commander’s belief in serious disruption was reasonable, based on evidence about business disruption, crowd size, serious disruption to worshippers at nearby synagogues and PSC’s own estimate of 100,000 participants.”
During the trial, Judge Sternberg also denied an application by Mark Summers KC on behalf of Jamal and Nineham to dismiss the case. Kevin Dent KC, representing the British government, showed the court a video of a speech made in January 2025 in which Jamal told a crowd that he and other protest leaders planned to attempt to walk towards the BBC’s headquarters to protest the corporation’s reporting of the genocide in Gaza as an example of “incitement”.
In response, Summers described the case against his clients as “unlawful,” citing a previous Court of Appeal ruling that legislation granting the police “unlimited powers” to restrict protests was enacted unlawfully.