Transparency & Accountability
Starmer's September deadline arrives on Britain's Palestine reparations claim
Transparency & AccountabilityGraphic: Times of Palestine
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The Britain Owes Palestine campaign gave Keir Starmer's government until September 2026 to answer a 400-page legal petition delivered to Downing Street a year earlier — and that deadline has now arrived with no public government response on the record.
The petition was delivered in September 2025 by Munib al-Masri, the 91-year-old Palestinian businessman and philanthropist, alongside his grandson, the historian Avi Shlaim and the legal scholar Victor Kattan. It was drafted by Ben Emmerson KC and Danny Friedman KC, with input from international-law scholar John Quigley, and addressed to Starmer, Yvette Cooper, John Healey and Attorney General Richard Hermer.
What the petition asks for#
The filing sets out seven requests, organisers say, including a public apology in the House of Commons and a formal investigation into reparations.
It is built on evidence the campaign says shows Britain's 1917–1948 occupation of Palestine — beginning with the Balfour Declaration's pledge of a Jewish national home in a territory then overwhelmingly Arab — was conducted unlawfully under the standards of the day and left a chain of consequence running to Gaza now.
Forty-five British MPs and peers separately pressed Starmer in March 2026 to apologise specifically for the Balfour Declaration, a parallel parliamentary push the government has likewise not answered on the record.
What happens if the deadline passes unanswered#
Organisers have said a non-response by the September deadline "may result in judicial review proceedings" — a court challenge to the government's failure to respond, rather than to the underlying historical claim itself, which UK courts have not been asked to adjudicate. No judicial review application had been filed as of this report; the campaign has not set a new date by which it will file one.
What the government has said#
Downing Street has not issued a substantive public reply to the petition's seven requests since receiving it in September 2025. Times of Palestine will cover the government's response, or the judicial review filing, the day either lands, carrying the government's position in full alongside it.
