POLICE used terrorism legislation to arrest peaceful protesters outside the Royal Courts of Justice today, as a landmark legal challenge to the ban on Palestine Action got under way.

An elderly man was among those taken away as around 150 protesters quietly sat on the ground holding signs reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action,” in an action co-ordinated by Defend Our Juries.

Inside the building, the High Court began considering a a bid to overturn the group’s proscription as a terrorism organisation, which has been in force since July 5.

Raza Husain KC, representing Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, said that the group was the “first direct-action civil disobedience organisation that does not advocate for violence ever to be proscribed as terrorist.”

“The suffragettes would have been liable to proscription if the Terrorism Act 2000 regime had been in force at the turn of the 20th century,” he argued.

Mr Husain said the ban was an “ill-considered, discriminatory, due process-lacking, authoritarian abuse of statutory power … that is alien to the basic tradition of common law and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

The barrister noted that there had been more than 2,000 arrests at protests against the group’s proscription, with “priests, teachers, pensioners, retired British army officers” and an “81-year-old former magistrate” among those taken into custody.

Sir James Eadie KC, for the Home Office, said the ban “strikes a fair balance between interference with the rights of the individuals affected and the interests of the community.”

Defend Our Juries has, meanwhile, raised concerns about a “stitch-up” after it emerged that judge Mr Justice Chamberlain had bee removed from presiding over the case last week without any explanation being given.

The judiciary press office refused to comment on the matter when approached by the Guardian.

Mr Justice Chamberlain, who was also recently removed from a legal challenge to Britain’s sale of F-35 aircraft parts to Israel, a case for which he had also granted permission, has now been replaced by a three-member panel.

Among them is Mr Justice Swift, who has previously acted for defence and home secretaries, and Ms Justice Steyn, who ruled in June that the government’s decision to export F-35 jets was lawful.

A Defend Our Juries spokesperson said: “In a case of such national significance, determining whether over 2,350 peaceful protesters will continue to be criminalised as ‘terrorists’ for holding cardboard signs, the public deserves transparency, not backroom manoeuvres to cherry-pick judges, threatening the fundamental principle of judicial independence.”