The United Kingdom does not have a blasphemy law, but that didn’t stop the Criminal Prosecution Service trying their best, leading to something of a volte-face after backlash.
50-year-old Hamit Coskun was charged with acting with intent to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” against the “religious institution of Islam” by the UK’s Criminal Prosecution Service (CPS) this week after allegedly burning a copy of the Qur’an outside the Turkish consulate in London. Yet after a short campaign by free speech activists, including the Free Speech Union, which is supporting Coksun, and Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, the charge has now been re-written after it was pointed out that the allegation is tantamount to a blasphemy prosecution.
The United Kingdom abolished blasphemy as an offence in 2008. Coksun’s lawyers called the charge “plainly defective”, given that the Public Order Act defines harassment as being against a person, which the “religious institution of Islam” is not.
For his own part, Coksun has said he was not trying to offend Islam at all, but rather was acting in solidarity with Salwan Momika, a Qur’an burner who was murdered in Sweden, and in protest against Turkey’s President Erdogan. The alleged burning hit headlines earlier this year because it was caught on camera, showing that within moments a second man appeared and slashed at the qur’an-holding man with a knife, shouting: “You fucking idiot. You don’t burn [the] Qur’an. This is my religion”.
Despite figures like Jenrick hailing the decision of the CPS to withdraw its ‘blasphemy’ bid, the victory is somewhat limited as he’s still being charged, the body have substituted new allegations to fit the prosecution they want to get. Now, he is accused of causing distress and being motivated by hostility towards members of a religious group, reports The Daily Telegraph.
Jenrick said: “Good news, it’s a victory for freedom of speech. The CPS have caved, and just announced they dropped the charge of ‘causing distress against the institution of Islam’ they they’d levied against a man alleged to have burnt a Qur’an. It should never have come to this, it was a perversion of the law and it would have introduced a blasphemy law by the back door”.
He added that the updated charge remained “seriously concerning” and insisted that in a free society, “it must be possible to criticise or to mock a religion. Parliament abolished blasphemy almost 20 years ago, and they were right to do so. We have to keep fighting to ensure we never re-introduce blasphemy laws by the back door. Today is a small victory for freedom of speech, but the fight goes on.”
Several European nations which abolished blasphemy laws in the past century now appear to be drifting towards bringing the offence back under pressure from religious leaders who wish to see texts protected from speech and deed. In the United Kingdom, Member of Parliament Tahir Ali spoke in the House in favour of a ban on “desecrations” of text and prophets and in Denmark the blasphemy law is already being brought back.
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