AC-2025-LON-002122 - [2025] EWHC 2013 (Admin)

Sir James submitted that, if judicial review were available, no proscribed organisation would need to apply for deproscription or appeal to POAC. This, he said, would render the carefully calibrated statutory regime a dead letter. I do not accept that submission.

Many applications for deproscription will be made on the basis that, whatever the position when the initial proscription order was made, by the time of the application to deproscribe the organisation has ceased to be concerned in terrorism. The organisation will often be one that operates in another country or countries. The focus of the application for deproscription, and of any appeal from a refusal to deproscribe, will be on how the organisation has changed, whether it has renounced the methods it previously used and on how political changes in the countries where it operates affect the way it is properly to be characterised. As I have said, this was the focus of the appeals which POAC has heard to date. (POAC has heard appeals in respect of only two organisations: the People’s Mujahideen of Iran and the Tamil Tigers.)

An organisation wishing to advance an argument of this kind could not, of course, seek judicial review of the initial decision to proscribe. It follows that, in such cases, the availability in principle of judicial review of initial decisions to proscribe would not affect in any way the use of the statutory deproscription procedure (and, if necessary, the appeal to POAC).