There are still some good judges left in England. Yesterday, one of them, Sir Joel Nathan Bennathan KC, granted Hamit Coskun’s appeal against his conviction for burning a Koran . Justice Bennathan began his decision with a forthright defence of ancient English liberties stating that ‘there is no offence of blasphemy in our law’. The judge is right, no matter how much some in the Crown Prosecution Service might wish otherwise.

We should be honest – this was an attempt to create a backdoor blasphemy law under which publicly disrespecting the religious preferences of Muslims would have become a crime

For, as the appeal decision says, while the CPS ‘accept that there is no law that criminalises blasphemy’, they claimed Hamit’s ‘choice to burn the Koran, knowing full well how upsetting that

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