Mick Hartley

A man is being prosecuted for causing distress to the religion of Islam by burning a copy of the Quran. From the Times:

Prosecutors have been accused of resurrecting the offence of blasphemy through “the back door” after charging a man for burning a copy of the Quran.

Hamit Coskun, 50, has denied religiously motivated harassment after setting alight a copy of the Muslim holy text outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge, central London, in February.

He is due to go on trial at Westminster magistrates’ court next month ­accused of “intent to cause against [the] religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress”, including shouting profanities about the religion.

So what? Someone shouting in the street, or burning a book, shouldn't be a criminal offence. Obviously. He's clearly being prosecuted for blasphemy.

However, on Tuesday the head of the National Secular Society wrote to senior prosecutors to call for the charges to be dropped.

Stephen Evans, the chief executive, said that there were “serious concerns about the nature of the charges” against Coskun.

Evans said that the society had received an opinion from a KC that described the charges as “plainly defective”, with a “fatal” flaw being that “the religious institution of Islam” was not a “person” under English law.

In the opinion, Akua Reindorf KC argued that treating a religious institution as a person evoked the notion of blasphemy — a common law offence that was abolished in England and Wales in 2008"….

A CPS spokesman said: “The law is clear and we will never hesitate to prosecute cases where there is hostility towards members of a racial or religious group.”

But no hostility was shown, as far as we can tell, to any member of a racial or religious group. He's being prosecuted, as they themselves (the CPS) say, for “intent to cause against [the] religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress”. So they're dissimulating. They're lying. He was protesting the religion, and they're prosecuting him for blasphemy.