English activist Tommy Robinson will be released from prison within the next week after his 18-month sentence for contempt of court was reduced at a High Court hearing on Tuesday.
Robinson, one of the most prominent campaigners against Muslim child rape grooming gangs in the country, was jailed last October after refusing to abide by a court order barring him from repeating claims about a Syrian teen, who successfully sued him for libel.
While Robinson had initially refused to take down social media posts with the allegations against the Syrian refugee, his lawyers informed the court that he now plans to abide by the court mandate, the BBC reports.
The presiding judge in the case, Mr Justice Johnson, said at the High Court on Tuesday that although Robinson showed an “absence of contrition or remorse,” he nonetheless has given the court “an assurance that he will comply with the injunction in the future, that he has no intention of breaching it again, and that he is aware of the consequences of what would happen if he breached the injunction again.”
The judge said that “the defendant will be released once he has completed the punitive element, which I understand will be within the next week.”
Representing Robinson, attorney Alex Di Francesco said on Tuesday that the offending posts have been removed, saying: “The defendant has demonstrated that commitment that Your Lordship required, both in his words and his actions.”
Robinson had previously lost a bid to have his sentence reduced in April. Though the judges said at the time that he could “reduce the period he has to spend in custody by taking the steps identified,” namely, taking down the accusations that the Syrian had acted violently when he was a student.
The court had also shot down requests from Robinson’s legal team against his segregation from other prisoners, which representatives for the activist have claimed amounted to solitary confinement and had exacerbated his “complex post-traumatic stress disorder”.
After being released from his last major stint in prison, having been jailed in the high-security Belmarsh Prison for filming suspected grooming gang child rapists as they entered court, Robinson said that his mental health was severely impacted. He claimed to have lost significant amounts of weight after his Muslim inmates had threatened to poison his food, forcing him to live off cans of tuna fish.
The men who Robinson filmed entering the court were later jailed after being found guilty for “campaign of rape and other sexual abuse” against young girls in England.
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