Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, claims the charge against Hamit Coskun is threat to free speech, reports The Telegraph, noting that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has tried to have him prosecuted for “harassing Islam”.
It is astonishing that those charged with formulating criminal charges on behalf of The Crown appear legally illiterate and ignorant of The Law. Blasphemy, as a crime, was abolished in UK law almost 20 years ago and therefore it is impossible to ‘harass” a religion. But it gets worse….
Upon realising they were making an error in law, the CPS have changed the charge to one of “likely causing harassment, alarm, or distress” to Muslims, as individuals. This is despite the fact that the Public Order Act specifically protects religious speech so that this sort of legal gymnastics cannot circumvent the intention of the law. This is not the first time the CPS have tried this stunt. In March they tried to prosecute a Christian preacher for insulting Islam by questioning its scriptural validity where it was contradicted by Christian scripture, under the POA, and failed. By any reckoning, this debate is a perfectly legitimate dispute by rival religions, but the sophistry that allowed the CPS to bring the POA into play is, I presume, that Muslims could be expected to be especially excitable when their religion is challenged and thus doing so might provoke a breach of the peace by the Religion of Peace.
Clearly no lessons were learned after the Metropolitan Police were forced to pay compensation to a preacher at Speakers’ Corner who, similarly – and quite legally – declared that, in his view, Islam was a false religion. Religions are, it has to be said, ‘mutually blasphemous’, so how we could expect to maintain this in an increasingly secular society that is also host to many more religions than in the past is anyone’s guess. But, of course, we all intuitively know the “two-tier” basis on which the de facto re-introduction of blasphemy prohibitions would be policed.
Humanists UK fear that the CPS really is attempting to “subvert the will of Parliament” by re-establishing blasphemy laws off its own bat. They make a detailed and persuasive case to that effect here. The National Secular Society – who initially objected to the “harassing Islam” charge – agrees.
Who disagrees? Who thinks prosecutions for offending religious sensibilities should return? Well, Socialist Voice.
