IN A significant moment in the fight to protect free expression in Britain, a man arrested for burning a copy of the Koran in Bradford will not face charges, following intervention by the Free Speech Union (FSU).
Dheyaa, a Christian whose full name is being withheld due to multiple credible threats against his life, arrived in Britain as an asylum seeker fleeing religious persecution. Ironically, he soon discovered that exercising his right to protest in Britain could land him in handcuffs. His crime? Uploading a video of himself burning a Koran as a symbolic stand for freedom of speech and against Islamic extremism.
West Yorkshire Police reacted swiftly, not to protect Dheyaa’s right to speak freely, sadly, but to arrest him on suspicion of inciting religious hatred. Initially, he was treated as a hate-crime suspect and subjected to extraordinary bail conditions which gagged him from discussing religion on social media.
The FSU intervened immediately, challenging these Orwellian bail conditions, instructing a solicitor to defend Dheyaa and covering all his legal costs. Late last month he learned he would face no charges.
That is great news, but our member should never have faced arrest in the first place.
Blasphemy laws were abolished in England in 2008, yet police tried to criminalise Dheyaa’s protest under the Public Order Act 1986. Sections 4A and 5 of this Act ban threatening or abusive behaviour intended or likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress. Prosecutors often add a religious dimension under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, making such charges potentially even more severe if hostility towards a religious group can be demonstrated.
But causing offence is not a crime. Under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998), provocative political expression, however uncomfortable or distasteful some find it, may not be suppressed without clear evidence of incitement to violence or genuine threat to public safety. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly upheld this robust principle, ruling consistently that shocking or offending public sentiment is not, and must never become, a basis for limiting fundamental freedoms (e.g. Gündüz v Turkey, 2003; Vajnai v Hungary, 2008).
Dropping charges in this case is especially significant because Dheyaa’s life has repeatedly been threatened due to his vocal opposition to Islamic extremism. His freedom to protest is not just a matter of abstract principle – it’s literally a matter of life and death. West Yorkshire Police’s decision to take no further action thus tacitly reaffirms the principle that symbolic political protests must never be criminalised simply because they offend or disturb.
Even so, this case points to a disturbing wider trend. Authorities are increasingly misusing public order laws to clamp down on provocative speech, especially when it involves the desecration of religious texts.
Recently, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) took the extraordinary step of naming a 47-year-old man and disclosing his address after he was charged for allegedly burning pages of the Koran in Manchester city centre. This was despite the known and immediate risks posed to those accused of blasphemy by radical Islamists.
The FSU criticised this action at the time, pointing out that GMP should have liaised with the Crown Prosecution Service before making these details public. In correspondence with Chief Constable Stephen Watson, FSU General Secretary Lord Young pointed to the recent murder in Sweden of Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika, who was shot after publicly burning the Koran. ‘By releasing [his] details, having charged him for something that should never have been a police matter,’ Young warned, ‘your force may well have placed him in significant danger.’
The man was charged with causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, and distress. In comments that did nothing to assuage fears of a creeping return to de facto blasphemy prosecutions in England, District Judge Margaret McCormack said during court proceedings that ‘the Koran is a sacred book to Muslims, and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress. This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behaviour.’
Against this backdrop, the outcome in Dheyaa’s case demonstrates how essential early intervention and dedicated legal advocacy by groups such as the FSU remains in resisting attempts to criminalise legitimate yet provocative forms of speech.
You’re unlikely to hear much about cases like these in the mainstream media – not necessarily through overt suppression, but through editorial choices calibrated to humour the chattering classes without cutting quite so brutally to the multicultural quick. Yet these cases deserve our time and our concern. It’s only when people start to recognise the quiet resurgence of censorship in Britain, cloaked under the guise of enforcing public order and tackling hate crime, that it can be effectively resisted.
So next time someone tries to dismiss concerns about free expression in this country as a ‘right-wing myth’, remind them of Dheyaa and the Manchester case. Without increased public vigilance, arrests and prosecutions like theirs risk becoming commonplace, slipping through the net due to lack of legal representation and gradually undermining Britain’s tradition of robust, open debate.
