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. The Times has the story.
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.
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.
The lawyer maintained that Coskun’s decision to burn a copy of the Quran was an act of political protest, which was protected under human rights law.
According to Reindorf’s advice, “a conviction on these facts would amount to the criminalisation of the act of desecrating a religious text in a public place”.
The KC added: “Both the wording of the charge and any conviction based on these facts would tend to suggest the reinstatement in English law of an offense of blasphemy by the back door.”
She reminded the CPS that the blasphemy law was not only abolished in 2008 but when it was in force, the legislation applied only to attacks on Christianity.
Blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales by the previous Labour government’s Criminal Justice Act 2008. The Scottish blasphemy law was only abolished four years ago and legislation remains on the statute book in Northern Ireland.
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.”
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