A blasphemy law by the back door is bad news for all of us

It is difficult to think of any more shocking, hateful or distressing non-violent act against Jews than the burning of a Sefer Torah. There is the obvious association with the Nazis, of course. But you can go back far earlier for an example of just how incendiary an act it is. The Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote that in the year 50 a soldier in Iudaea grabbed a scroll and “with abusive and mocking language”, burned it in public. There was almost a revolution until the procurator, Cumanus, quelled the unrest by beheading the soldier.

More recently, in 2023 Stockholm police gave permission to a Muslim activist to set a Torah alight outside the Israeli Embassy, but when he turned up for the scheduled burning he was carrying only a Koran, and told reporters he was simply trying to draw to attention to a recent burning of the Koran in Sweden.

Which brings us to Hamit Coskun and Martin Frost. Last Saturday Coskun pleaded not guilty to religiously motivated harassment after a Koran was burned outside the Turkish consulate in London. The week before, Frost had admitted a religiously aggravated public order offence after being filmed tearing pages from the Koran and setting them on fire in Manchester.

Whatever their respective motivations, it can surely be agreed that setting a Koran on fire is as shocking, hateful and distressing for Muslims as the burning of a Torah is for Jews. Before passing sentence on Frost, Judge Margaret McCormack told him: “The Koran is a sacred book to Muslims and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress.” That is obviously correct.

But her next sentence was deeply concerning: “This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behaviour.” This is completely the wrong way round. It is precisely because we are a tolerant country that we must allow the expression of views which are deeply offensive to many, and why it is imperative that the right to burn the Torah, the Koran or any holy text is affirmed and protected.

In recent years the supposed right not to be offended has been asserted in all sorts of contexts, but especially over religion and gender identity. There is, however, no such right, either in statute or common law. The common law offences of blasphemy (and blasphemous libel) were abolished by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act in 2008. But increasingly activists in both fields have claimed exactly that, leading to Sir Keir Starmer saying as Leader of the Opposition that “every” LGBT+ crime should be treated as an aggravated offence, with a jail sentence of up to two years. There was widespread speculation that this would include misgendering and the refusal to use “she/her” pronouns for trans women – speculation which he did not quash.

Last August, however, Lord Hanson, a Home Office minister, said there were “so such plans” when asked in the Lords whether the government planned “to make it a criminal offence to misgender an individual”.

But while the right not to be offended by misgendering may not exist in law, it is clear that a version of a blasphemy law is being created – not by Parliament but by the police, the CPS and the courts, specifically to create a right for Muslims not to be offended. This is based on a perverse parallel with the apparent rationale behind the refusal to act against grooming gangs. In those cases, it seems that the view of the authorities was that so-called community relations took priority over all else – and so men who raped children should not be prosecuted. When it comes to desecration of the Koran, however, it seems that community relations are held to require prosecution.

Doing this has meant re-interpreting the law in order to create a blasphemy offence. Sections 4A and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 make it an offence to use “threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour” intended (or likely) to cause harassment, alarm, or distress, aggravated under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 if hostility towards a religious group was a motivating factor. The prosecutions of Coskun and Frost could be seen as creating a blasphemy law which only applies to one religion on the basis that there might be someone present who finds the burning of the Koran offensive.

Ironically, it was in Sweden that Salwan Momika, a man who had burned the Koran outside Stockholm Central Mosque in 2023, leading to violent Muslim protests, was shot dead last month, just hours before the verdict was due on his trial for “agitation against an ethnic group”. The judge had said in his summing up that Sweden’s laws to protect free expression did not grant a “free pass” to offend a religion. Frost told the police here when he was arrested that when he burned the Koran he was expressing solidarity with Momika.

The direction of travel is clear. There has been no overt political decision to create a new blasphemy law, but equally there has been no decision to stop it. And that is deeply worrying.