British surgeon brings judicial review to challenge IHRA antisemitism definition
British surgeon Dr Ranjeet Brar launches landmark judicial review challenging the IHRA antisemitism definition, arguing it suppresses lawful criticism of Israel and violates human rights under Articles 9 and 10 of the ECHR.
Dr Ranjeet Brar has filed a judicial review challenging the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in British public life.
His case argues it has been used to suppress legitimate criticism of political Zionism and the Israeli government.
What the IHRA definition is and how it spread
The IHRA working definition, adopted by the organisation in 2016, describes antisemitism as a certain perception of Jewish people that may be expressed as hatred toward them. In itself it is unremarkable. The problem lies in its eleven illustrative examples, several of which explicitly bring criticism of the State of Israel within the definition’s orbit: “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”, “applying double standards” to Israel, “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.
These examples have no legal force of their own. They are a working definition from a non-governmental body. But British institutions adopted them as if they did. The Labour Party used the IHRA definition during its antisemitism crisis as a disciplinary instrument. Universities, local councils, police forces, NHS trusts, and government departments all adopted it after years of pressure from pro-Israel organisations including the Community Security Trust, the Board of Deputies, and the Jewish Leadership Council.
The result is a definition with no parliamentary mandate and no statutory grounding that now shapes how employers, universities, and public bodies investigate, discipline, and in some cases dismiss people who argue, lawfully, that Zionism is a political project they oppose.
The case
Brar is bringing the judicial review with support from the campaign group Right to Protest. The claim argues that adoption of the IHRA definition by public bodies violates the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and the right to hold opinions under Article 9. It also challenges the conflation of criticism of the State of Israel with hatred toward Jewish people as a religious and ethnic group.
It is the first legal challenge in a British court targeting the IHRA definition directly, rather than a specific disciplinary decision taken under it. Previous litigation has proceeded case by case: a lecturer dismissed here, a council employee disciplined there. This claim goes upstream, to the definition itself and to the institutional framework that has treated it as binding.
The legal question is whether a public body, in adopting a non-statutory instrument that captures political speech about a foreign state’s founding ideology, acts compatibly with its human rights obligations. On the face of it, that is a serious question.
Why the distinction matters
Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. This is not a controversial statement among historians, legal scholars, or a large proportion of Jewish communities globally. Zionism is a 19th-century political project: the movement for a Jewish state in historic Palestine, realised through the displacement of the Palestinian population in 1948. Opposing it is not the same as hating Jewish people. Thousands of Jewish people are themselves anti-Zionist, including rabbinical traditions that predate the State of Israel and movements such as Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Neturei Karta.
The IHRA definition’s illustrative examples blur this distinction. Critics argue that the political effect is to make criticism of the Israeli government and the ideology that founded it sound structurally equivalent to racism. That equivalence serves the Israeli government’s interests. It also serves the organisations that have invested years in enforcing it. It does not serve accurate thinking about either antisemitism or Palestine.
Real antisemitism exists and is a serious harm. Conspiracy theories about Jewish financial power, Holocaust denial, physical attacks on Jewish communities: these require vigorous response. What does not help is a definition that deploys the charge of antisemitism as a political instrument against people who hold entirely legitimate views about a foreign state. That misuse discredits the genuine article.
The lobby’s infrastructure
The campaign to embed the IHRA definition in British institutions was not spontaneous. The Conservative government formally adopted the IHRA definition in 2016. Over the following years, pro-Israel organisations pressed local authorities, universities, and public bodies to follow suit. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, in its 2020 report on Labour Party antisemitism, treated the IHRA definition as a reference point despite its non-statutory status.
By the time Keir Starmer became Labour leader, adoption of the IHRA definition in full was one of the ten pledges he made to the Jewish Leadership Council to secure endorsement. That pledge was not made to Parliament. It was made to a lobby group. It has since shaped disciplinary proceedings, candidate selections, and the parameters of acceptable speech inside one of Britain’s two major parties.
What the judicial review can and cannot do
A successful judicial review would not make criticism of Israel immune from all consequences. It would not ban employers from maintaining codes of conduct. What it would do is establish that no public body can treat the IHRA definition as if it carries the force of law, and that adopting a definition which captures political speech about a foreign state is incompatible with human rights obligations.
That is a bounded but meaningful outcome. The definition would not disappear. Lobby groups would continue to press for its use. But institutions adopting it could no longer claim they were simply following settled practice. Every disciplinary proceeding invoking it would face a harder legal challenge.
The courts move slowly and the outcome is uncertain. But the question the case raises is clear: whether the British state has, through repeated institutional adoption of a non-statutory document, allowed a foreign-policy lobby to narrow lawful political speech. That is a question worth putting to a judge.
