AS TCW has previously reported, a man who burnt a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London last April was convicted by magistrates under the Public Order Act 1986 but was cleared on appeal.
However the Crown Prosecution Service refused to let go, and lodged a further appeal, claiming that to burn a Koran in public was ‘inherently disorderly’.
This was dismissed by the High Court last Friday by two judges who made it clear that freedom of speech ‘must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb’. This meant that attempts by the CPS to re-introduce a blasphemy law by prosecuting protesters for burning copies of the Koran are unacceptable.
The Free Speech Union (FSU) described the decision in the case of Hamit Coskun as a ‘humiliating defeat’ for the CPS and called on the Director of Public Prosecutions to resign.
Despite this precedent-setting judgment, the CPS is still pressing ahead with a case against an FSU member, Martin Frost, who burned pages from the Koran in Manchester in February last year. When the police arrived (very quickly), he told them he was demonstrating solidarity with another anti-Islam activist, Salwan Momika, who was murdered in Stockholm after doing the same thing.
Frost has been charged under the Public Order Act 1986. The CPS claims his actions were criminal because they amounted to ‘causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm and distress’.
Given the infamous backlogs that dog the judicial system, Frost’s trial is listed not before November 2027, but the FSU hopes to have the case dismissed well before then.
The FSU says: ‘England hasn’t had blasphemy laws for 18 years. Yet the CPS has already spent hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to bring one in via the back door – one that applies only to Islam.’
The FSU is crowdfunding to finance the case. You can see it here.
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