Prairieland, USA to Filton, UK, does protest now mean terrorism?

‘Anti-terrorism laws address more than just terrorist threats – they suppress dissent in authoritarian regimes and expedite legal processes in democracies’.

Human rights defenders have been sounding the alarm over the shrinking space for political opposition globally. Two recent cases from the United States and the United Kingdom demonstrate how far governments are willing to stretch counter-terrorism law and the infrastructure of the War on Terror to continue their involvement in genocide unchallenged.

Echoing UK complicity in the American program of torture and kidnapping of Muslims during the War on Terror, today both countries have mutually embraced the logic of counter-terrorism as a tool to protect their profits by crushing anyone who tries to stand against them, even when it is their own citizens.

In Prairieland, Texas, eight activists were sentenced to around 450 years for participating in a protest outside an ICE detention facility, a rogue warning shot fired in self-defence skimmed a police officer by accident and was used to justify the collective punishment of those who were charged. In the UK, 25 activists were arrested over allegations that they broke into an Elbit Systems site to dismantle weapons that were bound for use in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In the first of four trials, four activists were found guilty of criminal damage, but because of the added terrorism connection, rather than the usual penalty of community service, their sentences were aggravated to between 5 and 8 years.

Despite the efforts of the judicial systems in both countries to present themselves as neutral arbiters, the criminal courtroom is in reality a political theatre, a site where the imperial agenda is advanced. Although judges in counter-terrorism cases often conceal proceedings behind a layer of secrecy, the courtroom is connected to the broader world as an active site for the development of logics of national security that crush dissent domestically and enable genocide abroad.

It is important to consider these uses of counter-terrorism law in a comparative perspective because, as international law professor Gregory Moses writes, ‘Europe has been just as lax as the US in permitting expansive and vague legal definitions of terrorism.’ Developments in different Western nations can inform how other states deploy their expansive counter-terrorism powers, as Moses shows by pointing to the labelling of Antifa as a terrorist organisation growing in popularity in both American and European politics.

In the name of national security

Prairieland and Filton reveal how “national security” allows the state to manipulate the criminal legal process and deny due process. CAGE has extensively documented how counter-terrorism law leads to distortions of justice, a key feature of both cases. By being treated as terrorism cases, both the Prairieland and Filton defendants had their rights violated throughout their legal proceedings.

These violations were so widespread that we can only list a few key examples. Restrictions in the evidence that could be presented to the jury, misrepresentations of activists’ intent as violent, and direct repression of the defence teams, to name a few.

In the Filton case, evidence was restricted by barring the defences the defendants could present in court. The defences of necessity and prevention of greater harm, for example, were not allowed. This meant that defendants were severely limited in speaking about their motivations and anything relating to Palestine, Israel and Elbit Systems.

In the Prairieland case, key evidence was deemed inadmissible. Putting it bluntly, George Lobb, an attorney for the defence, stated that “the prosecution broke the law when it hid this evidence from the defence”. These efforts were made to paint the defendants as irrational individuals by labelling them as ‘terrorists’ before their trials even began.

To further narratives of violence, in both cases, an individual was singled out for acting in self-defence with a genuine fear for their safety or that of others due to threats by police officers. In the Prairieland case, Benjamin Song received the harshest sentence after firing a shot at the ground which ricocheted and grazed a police officer. As Song describes, “I knew what it meant for someone to lean forward into a gun, […] to prepare for recoil. As the evidence shows, I did not want to hurt anyone. I never had the intent to hurt anyone.”

In the Filton case, Samuel Corner received the most severe sentence for Grievous Bodily Harm without intent, an alternative charge he received after the jury could not find him guilty of intent. Whilst recovering from being PAVA sprayed, Sam hit a police officer with a sledgehammer because, as he describes it, “I heard someone screaming and I thought she was being seriously hurt by security…I would never want to seriously hurt anyone.”

The screams Sam heard were of another defendant, Ellie Kamio who was being tasered for the second time in a row by the police. Tasers can pose significant health risks and have been linked to at least seventeen deaths in the UK since their introduction in 2003.

Both Benjamin and Sam faced a very real threat from state actors, who were more invested in safeguarding the state’s interests than in protecting human beings.

In whose interest?

It is not in the US or the UK’s interests to recognise that these individuals were genuinely fearful of state actors; that would mean admitting that the government is willing to risk the lives of their own citizens and that the theatrics of the courtroom can never be relied upon for any real justice. The efforts made through legal tools to paint both groups as terrorists and divorce them from their motivations and contexts reflect the government’s need to silence those who experience state violence at home and abroad; presenting them as irrational to continue to legitimise their crimes.

These circumventions of due process all served to advance government narratives that equate activists opposing racist state machinery to clandestine networks of terrorism. At its core, counter-terrorism law transforms individual criminal cases into mass prosecutions based on guilt by association.

Crimes like material support for terrorism in United States law lack intent requirements and allow the government to target entire movements at once. In the UK, this logic can be seen in the Court of Appeals decision justifying the proscription of Palestine Action. Proscription was deemed necessary because, in the court’s view, PA operated as a covert network.

Similarly, in Prairieland, the government presented common anti-repression tactics used by protest movements, such as encrypted communication and wearing black, as evidence of a criminal conspiracy. Baked into counter-terrorism law is the power for governments to criminalise entire ideologies by presenting them as broad, clandestine criminal networks. This has allowed for someone not even at a protest to be sentenced to 30 years for moving anarchist zines in Texas or be branded as a terrorist for simply holding up a placard in the UK.

Governments’ future utilisation of these dissent-crushing legal tactics has already happened again in Minnesota after Prairieland, with the Trump administration charging a large group of anti-ICE activists for conspiracy based on their organising over Signal.

A bleak future

The vital point is that these cases represent the natural progression of these legal frameworks. They should not be viewed as an exception to the normal operation of counter-terror laws or as an aberration of otherwise sound law: they represent counter-terror laws working as intended.

At its core, the label of terrorism is a vacuous term; as the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said wrote, there is ‘common agreement in expert literature and rhetoric that no real definition of terrorism was actually possible.’ Rather, developed as it was through Israeli figures like the Netanyahu family to delegitimise Palestinian resistance, the label of terrorism is designed to pathologise political struggle and, in the words of Said, present actions in “isolation from any explanation or mitigating circumstances, and… [in] isolation as well from representations of most other dysfunctions, symptoms and maladies of the contemporary world.”

The use of counter-terror laws to prevent defendants from presenting evidence of their intent is simply the logical outgrowth of a concept rooted in essentialising Muslims and Arabs to present them as irrationally violent. The label can be applied just as easily to activism at home, devoid as it is of any actual substance.

It is unsurprising then to see the label of terrorism applied to Palestine Action in the UK or Antifa in the US. Although neither is an actual organisation or group, this does not matter for a counter-terrorism logic that requires no actual facts, only a political ideology that the government wants to target.

The Filton 4 will be appealing the terrorism connection that was used to aggravate their sentences. This appeal will set a precedent for how protest cases will be dealt with in the future and has therefore been described as one of “fundamental constitutional significance”.

Terrorism has shifted from something that only exists abroad to a domestic issue and now a thought in your mind. It is about the government putting its interests over freedom of thought, let alone expression.

Both cases speak to the importance of refusing to play into narratives around terrorism. Rather than trying to prove that these individuals were not terrorists, we must recognise that the repression faced by the Prairieland and Filton groups is terrorism legislation working as intended.

The US and UK governments have used both cases to make an example, crushing any dissent or effective form of protest that recognises that the government will not give people their basic rights or stop committing war crimes simply because they are asked nicely. It is crucial that we understand that everyday actions can be equated with terrorism if our governments feel like it. This is not paranoid speculation, but a reality being actively realised in our courts.

Zahra Farooque is a Research Officer at CAGE, where she focuses on issues of justice and human rights. Her activism began during the 2024 UCL student encampment and she has since remained deeply engaged with the movement. Zahra is one of the Filton 25, a group of activists accused of dismantling weapons at a facility operated by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer. Zahra is currently awaiting trial, scheduled to begin in September 2026.

David Chmielewski is a researcher focused on the national security state and the suppression of dissent in the United States. He worked with CAGE on a report detailing the Trump Administration's use of War on Terror policies in criminal law and immigration. He has an academic background in law and decolonial theory.

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