Quakers in Britain are reeling from what they say is an unheard-of violation of one of their places of worship by police officers who forced their way into a meeting house in London and arrested activists gathered there to plan Gaza war protests.
“No one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory,” Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said in a statement issued after the raid.
But on Thursday evening, the pacifist group said, more than 20 uniformed police officers, some armed with tasers, forced their way into the meeting house in Westminster, breaking open the front door “without warning or ringing the bell.”
The officers searched the building and arrested six women at a gathering of Youth Demand, an unaffiliated activist group that was renting a room to meet in, the Quakers in Britain said.
The Metropolitan Police said the arrests followed Youth Demand’s plans to “shut down” London with protests next month, according to British media. The police said that while they recognized the right to protest, “we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent activity that crosses the line from protest into serious disruption and other criminality,” British media reported.
The arrests raised alarms in England, and came amid a crackdown on Gaza War protesters in the United States, especially on college campuses, where some students have denounced Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas.
Legal experts say that the Trump administration has been trampling on free speech rights, and after the raid on the meeting house, Quakers in Britain voiced similar concerns.
“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalizes protest,” Mr. Parker said.
In recent years, Britain has enacted several measures to crack down on protests and granted new powers to the police.
One of the measures, Public Order Act 2023, was described by the United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, as “deeply troubling.” The law imposes “serious and undue restrictions” on the right of peaceful assembly and criminalizes some forms of peaceful protest by Britons, according to the United Nations.
Youth Demand said in a statement that when the raid took place, it was having a “Welcome Talk” at the Quaker house to discuss Gaza, the West Bank and the climate crisis, and to share plans for nonviolent civil resistance actions that it has scheduled for next month.
The activists were told that they were being detained on suspicions of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” according to the group. Additional activists from the group were arrested the next day, it said.
Youth Demand said in an email on Sunday that it did not “have the full picture yet,” but that it appeared that about 10 arrests were made on Thursday and Friday and that 11 activists’ homes were raided. All of the activists have been released and none have been charged, the group said.
Youth Demand, which calls on the British government to stop all trade with Israel and to raise money from the wealthy to pay for environmental damage from fossil-fuel burning, was started last year. While relatively small, some of its protests have generated headlines.
In April, the group hung a banner and lined up children’s shoes outside the home of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, before he became prime minister. “Stop the killing” in Gaza, the banner read.
In a statement after the raid, the group called on “young people to take to the streets day after day and shut London down.”
Ella Grace-Taylor, 20, an actor-musician student who was arrested on Thursday at the meeting house, said in a video after her release that the group “will not be deterred.”
“We will let this fuel us because we know this means that we are winning,” she said. “It means that the government, that the police, that the state is afraid of us, that they recognize the power that we have.”
The Metropolitan Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
