I'm no terrorist, says former magistrate facing six months in prison

Late on Saturday afternoon last month, former magistrate Deborah Hinton, 81, was being fingerprinted in a police station and having a DNA swab extracted from her mouth. She was then held in a cell for more than seven hours under the Terrorism Act.

- Jon Ungoed-Thomas

Hinton is a former member of the national parole board, who was awarded an OBE in 1994 for services to the community. Her husband, Nicholas Hinton, who died in 1997, had been director general of Save the Children Fund and an international peacekeeper.

Hinton was among more than 100 people arrested that weekend for supporting Palestine Action, a group recently proscribed by the Labour government for being a terrorist organisation. It was the first time in her life that Hinton had been arrested.

"They're not preventing terrorism any more by arresting me because I wasn’t a terrorist in the first place," she said. "The rights to demonstrate and other rights are being eroded systematically by the government. We are on a slippery slope to all demonstrations being banned."

Palestine Action was proscribed on 5 July, putting the direct action group in the same legal category as groups such as al-Qaida and Islamic State. The move was taken after an estimated £7m of damage was caused to planes at RAF Brize Norton in June, according to police, in an action claimed by the group.