Ihad hoped I would never have to write about Hamit Coskun again. After the Quran-burner won his appeal in October, it seemed that this particular battle in the free speech wars was over. Unfortunately the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have other ideas. On Friday evening the state prosecutor announced that it was going to appeal Coskun’s successful appeal. The language in their appeal application is particularly revealing.

In that document the CPS describes burning a Quran as ‘an obviously provocative act’, which is ‘highly controversial’ and ‘has led to widespread international protests and condemnation, particularly from Muslim communities and governments, and has provoked numerous well-documented incidents of disorder and violence’. This is similar to the arguments they made at Ha

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