British prosecutors were forced into a rapid reversal this week after charging a man under a law critics say amounted to enforcing blasphemy — despite such laws being abolished in the UK nearly two decades ago. The case against 50-year-old Hamit Coskun has drawn sharp criticism from free speech advocates and prominent political voices.
Coskun had allegedly burned a copy of the Qur’an outside the Turkish consulate in London, reportedly in solidarity with Salwan Momika — a Qur’an burner murdered in Sweden — and in protest against Turkey’s President Erdogan. The event was caught on video and made headlines after a second man slashed at Coskun with a knife while shouting, “You don’t burn [the] Qur’an. This is my religion.”
Initially, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charged Coskun with intending to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” to the “religious institution of Islam.” That framing quickly drew backlash, with legal analysts and critics noting that the Public Order Act applies to harassment of individuals — not ideas or belief systems.
The Free Speech Union and Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick led a campaign highlighting that the charge functionally resurrected blasphemy law through a legal loophole. The CPS subsequently altered the charge, dropping the explicit reference to Islam as an institution and replacing it with allegations of causing distress and being motivated by hostility toward members of a religious group.
Jenrick praised the withdrawal of the original charge, calling it “a small victory for freedom of speech,” but warned the new allegation remains troubling. “In a free society, it must be possible to criticise or to mock a religion,” Jenrick said, warning against reintroducing blasphemy laws “by the back door.”
The UK repealed its blasphemy laws in 2008. However, as pressure builds across Europe to protect religious texts from desecration, concerns grow that governments are quietly reintroducing such laws under the guise of hate crime statutes. Denmark has already taken steps to reestablish blasphemy protections, and in the UK, MP Tahir Ali recently spoke in Parliament in favor of banning desecration of religious texts and prophets.
Coskun’s legal defense team maintains that the case against him is “plainly defective” and continues to challenge the legitimacy of the CPS’s revised charges.
