"We Accept Of Course That It Is Draconian: And Deliberately So"

On Friday 4 July I headed back to the Royal Courts of Justice for the hearing brought by Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action, on an application for relief from the proscription order against Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

Huda had applied for judicial review of the legality of this order. There is to be a hearing on whether a judicial review will be granted in the week beginning 21 July. What Friday's hearing was about, was whether the proscription should be suspended until that hearing on whether permission will be given for judicial review.

This is called interim relief.

The legal precedents on interim relief are that this question should depend on three points.

The first is the probability that a full judicial review might ultimately succeed, in other words a preliminary assessment of the merits of the case.

The second is whether irremediable damage will be done to anyone in the meantime if the order is not suspended, should the result of the process eventually be a successful judicial review.

If those two hurdles are passed, the third is whether on a "balance of convenience" the irremediable harm that might be done if the Order is not suspended but ultimately is set aside on review, is worse than the irremediable harm that the public might suffer from losing the benefit the government intend by the Order in the interim, should the judicial review be denied or eventually confirm the legality of the Order.

At this stage I presume you are deciding whether to bother to read that six times until it makes some sort of sense, or whether this is going to be an impenetrably dull article full of arcane legal nonsense and you would rather browse something else.

I do sympathise.

On Thursday I had spent the train journey down from Edinburgh trying to get my head round all this; at one stage I had a lovely tourist couple from Hungary, who had the bad luck to share the train table with me, each kindly holding sheaves of documents and using their thumbs as placeholders.

I rose at 6am on Friday to ensure I would get into the courtroom. I was anticipating that, as with the Assange hearings or the ICJ hearings on Genocide, there may be a long queue waiting to enter. In fact there was nobody at all at 7am except me and a great many policemen.

I had a coffee opposite the court building, and a constant stream of policemen came into the coffee shop to buy coffee and doughnuts. By 07.45 there was not a doughnut left within a mile of the Strand.

Anthropologists should study this. British policemen have no history with doughnuts. They never occupied any place in Metropolitan Police culture. However a continual barrage of American films and television programmes portray policemen as doughnut-eating; so presumably British police think this makes them cool. In fact it makes them fat.

I shall not be paranoid about the fact the police kept photographing me as I hung round waiting for something to happen. They had nobody else to photograph. I tried to think of things I might do that look suspicious, to make their morning more interesting, but I don't think my imagination had managed enough sleep.

I am not going to sugar coat this. I kept going to the cafe loo to vomit. In fact I kept having to go and order coffees in various establishments to have somewhere to vomit. I had been up most of the night being sick. I hadn't eaten anything suspect, and I assume it was a virus. This continued into the afternoon, and once court proceedings started I would race away at less charged moments to be sick.

At 8.30am I went down the Strand to Boots to buy some medicine. On my return ten minutes later, I saw an entire fleet of police vans arrive and park up around Arundel Street, about 150 metres from the court but out of sight.

I counted 16 vans and 11 cars. The vans appeared to have 12 to 15 policemen in each. That was only around one side of the court. It was a stern reminder of the issues at stake, and that proscription as a terrorist group gives colossal police-state powers. There are penalties of 14 years in prison should you merely "appear to" support a proscribed group, or be "reckless" as to whether you say something that may cause someone else to support it.

This is the Terrorism Act 2000 as originally passed, by the horrible combination of Jack Straw and Tony Blair. It has since been amended to be even worse and make plain that no intent is required - if you "appear" to support, "recklessly" a proscribed organisation, you can be liable for 14 years imprisonment.

For some reason the amended version is not available on the official government website.

At 9am I entered the Royal Courts of Justice. I have spent many more days here than I would wish, and have described the place before:

"The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of grey and brown, valuing scale over proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an indication of the stupidity of large scale power."

Well, here I was again. Previously I had only been in the more prestigious courtrooms, off the main hall, courts 1 to 15. This case was to heard in court 73. It was in the East Wing. This required an extremely complex feat of navigation through endless corridors where your footsteps echoed from the vaulted stone ceilings, through uncountable pointed arches, passing open courtyards and cloisters, up stairs and then down.

With every stage the arches got lower, the architraves shallower, the corridors narrower, as you receded from the show of pomp to the mundane exercise of power. By the time you were in the cramped L-shaped corridor outside court 73, you might have mistaken it for a 1950s unemployment benefit office in Solihull.

I was first there but other people started to arrive for the hearing and the corridor became crowded and uncomfortably hot - it was one of the hottest days of the summer. At one point I felt about to faint, and Deepa Driver came to my rescue with a bottle of water.

We were told the court would open at 10.15am. In the ensuing hour I twice lost my place in the queue as I had to leave to go vomit. This did enable me to have a quick chat on the stairway with Gareth Peirce about the prospects for the case.

I managed to get back towards the front of the queue each time, either because of immense personal charm or because people got out of the way as I smelt faintly of sick, you decide. But in the end it availed nothing as only accredited media were allowed into the courtroom.

I am famously not a journalist in the UK, as ruled by Lady Dorrian in the High Court of Scotland - it's a long story - so I was not admitted. I was sent instead to an overflow room in court 76 on the floor above, where proceedings could be watched on live screens.

So for this section of proceedings I was not in court. While sound and picture quality were excellent, this was not the same as being in the court itself in terms of picking up the atmosphere and all the little things which the camera does not show. It has never happened to me before in all my reporting.

The hearing was before Justice Chamberlain. He has a liberal reputation. In a case earlier this year, he stated that he had no confidence in statements by MI5.

In cases involving secret intelligence, British "justice" has an extraordinary procedure whereby the defendant is not allowed to know the evidence against him, but can be defended on that point in a closed court, without the defendant, by a court-appointed barrister known as a "Special Advocate".

Martin Chamberlain was such an advocate for ten years, and it is impossible for anybody with a slightest modicum of honesty to view a large quantity of intelligence reports without understanding that a high proportion of it is simply inaccurate.

I speak as someone who read an average of perhaps twelve secret intelligence reports every day over a 22-year career.

This is hopeful because the Secretary of State had indicated that in the substantive hearing, there will be intelligence reports on which the government will rely in its evidence against Palestine Action.

It has been widely leaked to the press that this includes intelligence reports that Palestine Action receives funding and backing from foreign states - which really is nonsense.

Justice Chamberlain also ruled against the legality of certain British arms exports to