Mick Hartley

Astonishingly, the Crown Prosecution Service is proposing to appeal against the dropping of charges against Hamit Coskun.

He was the man who set fire to a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London, and was then attacked by a Muslim man armed with a knife. He, Coskun, was found guilty of a “religiously aggravated public order offence” – in other words, blasphemy. No charges were ever brought against the man with the knife. The conviction was later overturned:

“We live in a liberal democracy,” the judge said. “One of the precious rights that affords us is to express our own views and read, hear and consider ideas without the state intervening to stop us doing so. The price we pay for that is having to allow others to exercise the same rights, even if that upsets, offends or shocks us.”

That’s what the CPS now objects to. David Shipley in the Spectator:

I had hoped I would never have to write about Hamit Coskun again. After the Quran-burner won his appeal in October, it seemed that this particular battle in the free speech wars was over. Unfortunately the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have other ideas. On Friday evening the state prosecutor announced that it was going to appeal Coskun’s successful appeal. The language in their appeal application is particularly revealing.

In that document the CPS describes burning a Quran as ‘an obviously provocative act’, which is ‘highly controversial’ and ‘has led to widespread international protests and condemnation, particularly from Muslim communities and governments, and has provoked numerous well-documented incidents of disorder and violence’. This is similar to the arguments they made at Hamit’s original trial. The fact that Moussa Kadri went into his home, returned with a knife and slashed at Hamit with it was held up as evidence of how provocative the Quran burning must have been. 

He upset some Muslims, therefore he must be prosecuted.

In an even more disturbing part of the CPS appeal application, they describe burning a Quran as ‘an act of desecration’, and are concerned that Coskun’s case ‘will undoubtedly be relied upon in future public order cases involving inflammatory acts of desecration’. Put simply, they want to be able to continue to prosecute and convict anyone whose actions violate Islamic blasphemy codes. 

The mask is off now. In the world of the CPS, violence committed by unstable Muslims who can’t bear the sight of a book being burned is proof that those books shouldn’t be burned. Even worse, they are speaking the language of Islamic blasphemy codes, trying to introduce the idea that burning a book is an ‘act of desecration’ simply because Muslims believe it to be so. 

What’s going on inside the CPS? There must be powerful voices within the organisation pushing for this. Prosecuting Coskun the first time was bad enough, but to then appeal against the overturning of his conviction, made on clear free speech grounds, suggests that we have a real problem here.

What the CPS are doing is dangerous and sinister. They need to come clean on who within the organisation is so determined to create Islamic blasphemy laws in England. Those civil servants who are trying to subvert law and justice are a threat to us all. As Mr Justice Bennathan made clear at Hamit’s appeal in October ‘there is no offence of blasphemy in our law’.