Starmer Dragged Into Free Speech Union’s Koran-Burning Court Case

This morning, Hamit Coskun will appear before Westminster Magistrates Court, where he’s being prosecuted for burning a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish Consulate. The Free Speech Union is paying for his defence. The Telegraph has more.

Hamit Coskun is quite possibly Britain’s most endangered man. Certainly he appears to have a death wish. In February, he took a coach to London, walked up to the Turkish consulate, pulled from his bag a Koran, and set fire to it with a lighter.

A video of the incident went viral after Mr Coskun, aged 50, was violently attacked for what he insisted was a meaningful protest and what many other people would view as an anti-Islamic stunt.

In the aftermath of the Koran burning, he says two Iraqi men broke into his home in Derby and threatened him with a knife and an ashtray. Police took him from his home and moved him to a safe house elsewhere in the Midlands, a nondescript terrace that I won’t describe further for obvious reasons.

On Wednesday, he goes on trial at Westminster magistrates’ court charged with disorderly behaviour likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” for setting the Koran alight. As he did so, according to the charges, Mr Coskun swore, and then shouted “Islam is religion of terrorism” in his broken English. He is accused under the Public Order Act of being motivated “by hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam”.

Mr Coskun remains unrepentant. He will plead not guilty and intends to go on a tour of the UK burning Korans in other cities, whether he wins or loses his case.

He himself has become a cause célèbre. The Free Speech Union has taken up his case and paid for a security team as well as half his legal fees – the National Secular Society is paying for the other half. Meanwhile, an American woman who read about his arrest online plans to fly to the UK and join Mr Coskun in future Koran-burning protests.

Mr Coskun’s lawyers will argue that he has a human right to peaceful protest, under Article 10 of the Convention on Human Rights, to burn a Koran if he wants to.

They have found an unlikely ally: Sir Keir Starmer.

Almost a quarter of a century ago, Sir Keir, in his day job as a human rights barrister, successfully argued that a peace activist had the legal right to deface the Stars and Stripes flag in a protest outside a US airbase in Norfolk. In 2001, Sir Keir told the High Court: “Flag denigration is a form of protest activity renowned the world over.”

He added that the court should protect the right of his client – a 59-year-old peacenik – to stage a “peaceful protest in a free and democratic society”.

The High Court agreed with Sir Keir and quashed his client’s conviction for disorderly behaviour “likely to cause harassment, alarm and distress” – the same part of the Public Order Act under which Mr Coskun is charged.

His client, Lindis Percy, would later suggest that Sir Keir had told her he had worn underpants emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes so he could show his unwavering support for her whenever he sat down wearing them.

Sitting in his safe house, Mr Coskun, a father-of-three, in some ways makes for an unlikely heroic figure. He is diminutive – just 5ft 5in tall – and courageous to the point of madness. He speaks no English, talking through an interpreter via Zoom. It takes him 10 minutes to answer the question: “How old are you?” because of a mix up over his papers at birth. He says he is officially 50 although he looks older.

Mr Coskun came to the UK from Turkey two and half years ago to flee persecution. He is seeking asylum and his case is under review. He is half Armenian and half Kurdish and a committed atheist, who spent close to a decade in jail for membership of a Kurdish political party that Turkish authorities said – and which Mr Coskun denies – was a terrorist front. He was a political activist who was “abused and tortured” in detention; on one occasion a gun was put to his neck.

He had become alarmed at what he sees as the Islamification of Turkey, constitutionally a modern secular state but where, he says, recent times have seen Islamism gain a hold, stoked by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, its authoritarian president, to maintain his grip on power.

It explains his decision to make the trip down to London on Feb 13. The week before, he had posted on social media his concern that the Koran was catapulting Turkey to sharia law. “I have been studying the Koran for 25 years now,” he says, convinced it encourages terrorism.

“So on February 13 I went to London, I took the bus. At 2pm in front of the Turkish consulate. That’s because Turkey has been made a base for extremism and that is why I burned the Koran,” Mr Coskun says.

He packed the Koran, two lighters (so he had a spare) and then set it alight outside the consulate.

All hell broke loose.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Watch me interviewing Hamit Coskun in a video about why the Free Speech Union is concerned about this Government’s attempts to bring in a blasphemy law by the back door.