District Judge John McGarva has reserved judgment in the case of FSU member Hamit Coskun, who stood trial this week at Westminster Magistrates’ Court for burning a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish Consulate in London. The judge will now deliver his verdict at 11am on Monday.
Hamit, 50, is a Kurdish-Armenian asylum-seeker from Turkey. As a committed atheist, his actions were, he says, a protest against the “Islamist government” of President Erdoğan, which he accuses of turning the country into “a base for extremism”. At the trial, the court heard how he was imprisoned for seven years in Turkey for his involvement with a banned political party, during which time he was tortured. His brother, also an activist, was killed in 1997. Hamit followed proceedings with the aid of a Turkish translator.
The FSU jointly funded his legal defence with the National Secular Society, and has also paid for his security following death threats. You can watch our Director Lord Young’s interview with him here.
Hamit was initially charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to “the religious institution of Islam” – a formulation legal experts criticised as fundamentally flawed, since religious institutions are not recognised as legal persons under English law. In a legal opinion commissioned by the National Secular Society, Akua Reindorf KC argued that any conviction on such a basis would amount to “the reinstatement in English law of an offence of blasphemy by the back door”.
Following these criticisms, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) amended the charge to allege that his actions were motivated by hostility towards members of a religious group – namely, followers of Islam – under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. This criminalises words or behaviour likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” – which, in Hamit’s case, were treated as “racially or religiously aggravated” under Section 31 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998: a provision that increases the potential penalties. Coskun also faces an alternative charge of public disorder contrary to Section 5 without the religious aggravator.
Even after the charge was revised, Hamit’s defence team argued that the case represented a dangerous attempt at “effectively chilling the right of citizens to criticise religion”. Although blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales in 2008, Katy Thorne KC told the court that “to render such an act a criminal offence is tantamount to reintroducing a blasphemy law in relation to Islam” – and that the trial should therefore not go ahead. In written submissions, she argued this would make the Koran a “specially protected object” and warned that the case “undermined the criminal justice system”.
Judge McGarva, however, disagreed. “This is not an attempt to bring back old blasphemy laws, or a wider blasphemy law related to Islam,” he said.
After he ruled that the trial should proceed, prosecutors alleged Hamit set fire to a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge on 13 February while shouting “f*** Islam” and “Islam is religion of terrorism”; and that he was motivated by hostility towards Muslims.
The incident, which was caught on video, also saw Hamit physically assaulted. A passerby confronted him and shouted: “You’re a f***ing idiot… I’m going to f***ing kill you now”, before attacking him. The man later pleaded guilty to assault. Hamit was hospitalised with a hand injury prior to his arrest. He later told police: “I have been exercising my democratic right to protest by setting fire to the Koran.” During the trial, it emerged that the CPS had applied for a reporting restriction under section 4(2) of the Contempt of Court Act to prevent the press from stating that the attacker had used a knife. The judge refused the application.
Philip McGhee, for the Crown, told the court: “He is being prosecuted for his disorderly behaviour in public… Nothing about the prosecution of this defendant for his words and actions… has any impact on the ability of anyone to make any trenchant criticism of a religion.”
It was in this context that the prosecution argued the violent response to Hamit’s protest was itself evidence that his conduct was “disorderly”. In other words, his actions were not peaceful because they risked – and in fact led to – someone assaulting him. Many people might feel this argument risks creating a ‘heckler’s veto by violence’, whereby if extremists threaten violence in response to provocative but lawful speech, the speech becomes criminalised.
Another danger in the Crown’s argument was its apparent collapse of a crucial legal distinction between attacking a belief and attacking the people who hold it. Indeed, the prosecution repeatedly sought to frame Hamit’s denunciation of Islam as a little more than a ruse to express his hostility towards Muslims.
But as Ms Thorne argued, Section 29J of the Public Order Act exists precisely to protect the right to criticise, insult or ridicule religious beliefs – even in trenchant or offensive terms – without that criticism being mistaken for hatred of believers.
In a revealingly odd moment during cross-examination, the prosecution challenged Hamit on why he burned the entire Koran, rather than only the passages he found objectionable – as if the scope and tone of a person’s criticism of Islam should determine whether that criticism is legally protected:
Q: You have referred to passages which you say promote terror – we have seen the size of the book. Those passages are a minority of the content?
A: No.Q: You refer to 50 passages.
A: 50 plus.Q: Somewhere between 50 plus and 70 per cent you object to – but not the rest.
A: Important passages.Q: But there are passages which peace-loving followers of Islam adhere to?
A: Islam is terrorist and terrorists act on the Koran.Q: You burned the book?
A: Yes.Q: Not about a selective choice of passages you object to – you just wanted to burn it.
A: Those passages are enough for it to be burned as a whole book.
So if Hamit had burned only bits of the Koran, that would have been OK? Such a granular approach suggests a procedural view of political expression so determinedly pedantic as to stifle it completely.
And not least, of course, when it comes to protests against Islam. The FSU, however, continues to support the principle that, while religious tolerance is an important British value, it doesn’t require non-believers to respect the blasphemy codes of believers. On the contrary, it requires people of faith to tolerate those who criticise and protest against their religion, just as their values and beliefs are tolerated.
