Do we dare read Sally Rooney… or is that, too, an act of terror?

Every legislative act is liable to produce unintended consequences. So it is with order number 803 of July 2025 – the Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order.

This controversial instrument, promulgated by the home secretary the month before, determined that the direct actions of Palestine Action – causing serious harm to property, harassing people etc with the aim of stopping arm sales to Israel – was not merely criminal but terroristic. The organisation has challenged its listing as a terror group and legal proceedings are under way – some behind closed doors because, we are told, the full rationale for the decision is sensitive and we, the public, cannot be allowed to know it.

Sally Rooney, the renowned Irish writer, has contributed two witness statements to the proceedings expressing her support for the organisation and its members. She believes they are part of Britain’s “long and proud tradition of civil disobedience – the deliberate breaking of laws as an act of protest”, in the spirit of the suffragettes and, more recently in the context of the Iraq war, the breaching of RAF bases to protest a violation of international law.

Rooney submitted a first statement in July. It set out the basis for her support: her belief that Israel was committing atrocity crimes against the Palestinian people in violation of international law and articulating her right to be able to support action against “any nation offering military support to Israel, including the United Kingdom”. She also expressed concern that the ban would make expressions of her own beliefs a terror offence under UK law and prevent her from travelling to Britain or speaking here.

A month later, she wrote in the Irish Times: “I want to be clear that I intend to use these proceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can.”

The consequences are described in her second witness statement, submitted last month. In September, she was not able to travel to Britain to receive the Sky Arts award for literature for her novel Intermezzo. Element Pictures, which produced the BBC TV adaptations of her books, including Normal People, informed her literary agents, the Wylie Agency, that it had received “unambiguous legal advice” that it could not pay Rooney “if they knew or had reasonable cause to suspect that” payments “will or may be used for the purposes of terrorism [will be used to fund Palestine Action]”.

Such payments to Wylie, and transfer to Rooney, “would be a criminal offence in the UK under the Terrorism Act 2000”, it said. Rooney now worries that this will also be the case for book royalties from her UK publisher, Faber & Faber.

In other words, she says in her statement to the court, she may be able to publish in Britain but may not be paid. So writers in her position face “a stark choice”: they can choose the path of silencing themselves – and the interests of those they seek to support – “or they can continue to express themselves honestly, but face serious legal consequences – and potentially exile from the creative community of Britain and Northern Ireland – for so doing”.

Of course, Rooney does not need to put herself in this position, and could quietly donate her royalties and no one would be any the wiser. But she has taken a stance based on principled opposition and the right to express herself openly. That right now appears to be undermined by the government’s decision to proscribe an entire organisation – for reasons unknown – rather than rely on ordinary criminal law.

The chilling effect of order 803 may extend even further. Why not entangle publishers, booksellers and even readers? The logic of the law suggests that the mere purchase of a Rooney book, or the payment of a modest sum to watch a TV adaptation, may contribute to her royalties and in this way entail some degree of complicity in the commission of a crime under the Terrorism Act. There is nothing new in the chilling effects of far-reaching laws taken by autocratic states that seek to stifle protest. The life of the law is not logic, it might be said, but absurdity, to borrow from the US jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

In 2022, the Russian translator of my book East West Street, a distinguished poet, was arrested for protesting at the use of force against Ukraine. In Moscow’s Pushkinskaya Square, while she was preparing a peaceful protest, the police spotted a rolled-up paper poking out of her backpack. They stopped her, asked to see it and read the lines of a poem by Nikolay Nekrasov, Listening to the Horrors of War, written in 1855. (The poet was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s accounts of war in Crimea and later published his Sevastopol Sketches.)

The poet and translator was arrested, charged, tried and convicted. Her crime? Nothing beats an actual quotation from the charge sheet: “Discrediting the current special operation by reading the text that Nekrasov wrote at the tail-end of the Crimean war, having been influenced by Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches.” My offer to pay the fine was politely declined on the grounds that its acceptance would make the recipient a foreign agent, which is another crime.

Readers, poets and writers who wish to protest, take note! Peaceful protest and expression is not and should not ever be an act of terror, or a crime, at least not in a reasonable world. Nor should the payment of a royalty or other fee to a novelist seeking to express her support for the rule of law lead to such unintended and Kafkaesque grotesquerie.

Philippe Sands is former president of English PEN

Photograph by Ellius Grace/The New York Times/Redux/eyevine