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…
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