Free speech advocate peer Lord Young hailed a “huge victory” after the conviction of a man for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate was overturned by a superior court on Friday.
Criminal law does not exist to “avoid people being upset, even grievously upset” and freedom of expression is a right that includes the right to “views that offend, shock or disturb”, a British court ruled on Friday.
The forthright judgement from judge Mr Justice Bennathan at the Crown Court came as he overturned the conviction under the Public Order Act of Hamit Coskun in July for a protest staged in London outside the Turkish consulate where he set fire to a Qur’an.
The incident was less remarkable for the act of the burning, which has become a symbol of protest seen across Europe, but rather for the immediate violence visited upon Coskun. As he lit the book he was almost immediately set upon by two men.
The pair did not know each other, but were both so incensed by the sight of the burning book they moved quickly to attack. One man with a knife who shouted “I’m going to kill you… Burning the Koran? It’s my religion, you don’t burn the Koran” was later convicted but spared any jail time for slashing at Coskun.
A second man, a passing food delivery rider, kicked Coskun.
The Free Speech Union warned the conviction of Coskun created through precedent a defacto blasphemy law in Britain, a legal concept that had long ago been dispensed with by Parliament, and backed Coskun’s appeal.
The Union argued Coskun had been making a legal protest against political Islam under President Erdogan in Turkey and that the court had wrongly “conflated his political protest against Islam with hatred of Muslims, effectively reviving blasphemy law by the back door”.
Hailing the ruling today, the FSU said: “Had the verdict been allowed to stand, it would have sent a message to religious fundamentalists up and down the country that all they need to do to enforce their blasphemy codes is to violently attack the blasphemer, thereby making him or her guilty of having caused public disorder.”
Lord Young of Acton, freedom of speech advocate who founded the Free Speech Union which had launched a fundraising campign for Coskun’s appeal called today’s ruling a “huge victory”. He said “the Crown Court has sent the opposite message — that anti-religious protests, however offensive, must be tolerated.”
De facto Conservative leader Robert Jenrick had accompanied Coskun to court on Thursday for the first day of proceedings and promoted his cause. In his response to the ruling, he emphasised that while he found the burning of the Qur’an as a means to protest distasteful, nevertheless he absolutely supported the right to do it.
Jenrick said on Friday: “Hamit Coskun has been cleared. Good. I didn’t like what Mr Coskun did; burning a religious text was not pleasant. But it was also never criminal. So, this is an important victory for free speech.
“Parliament voted to abolish blasphemy laws 20 years ago. It was disgraceful that the authorities attempted to re-create them by the back door.”
The Crown Court published the ruling of judge Mr Justice Bennathan in the case of the Crown versus Mr Hamit Coskun, in which the judge sitting with two Justices of the Peace ruled:
There is no offence of blasphemy in our law. Burning a Koran may be an act that many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive. The criminal law, however, is not a mechanism that seeks to avoid people being upset, even grievously upset. The right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.
We live in a liberal democracy. 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.
The criminal law does intervene to protect people, it noted, stating those who harass can commit an offence. But nevertheless, there has to be balance, and the ruling cited case law which had previously ruled that making speech that causes disorder illegal hands a great deal of power to counter-protesters as it hands them an absolute legal heckler’s veto.
As cited:
It would have been going much too far to prohibit all speech and conduct likely to occasion a breach of the peace because determined opponents may not shrink from organising or at least threatening a breach of the peace in order to silence a speaker whose views they detest.
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