“The Free Speech Union is delighted that Hamit Coskun’s appeal has been successful.”
It is, quite simply, a very important victory for free speech today. And if you care about living in a country where you can think, speak, dissent, and yes, offend without the long arm of the state hauling you before a court, then you should be raising a glass to Hamit Coskun tonight.
Because Britain does not have, and must never have, blasphemy laws.
And yet, somehow, in the year 2025, a man was convicted under the Public Order Act for burning a book as a political protest against the rise of political Islam and the increasingly authoritarian regime of President Erdoğan in Turkey.
“The Free Speech Union is delighted that Hamit Coskun’s appeal has been successful.”
That line should ring out like the tolling of a liberty bell. Because this was not just about one protester, one moment, one book. This was about whether Britain was about to sleepwalk into a modern blasphemy code, not written in statute, but enforced by fear.
The Absurdity of the Original Conviction
Incredibly, the court that first convicted Hamit did so not because of what he did, but because of how others reacted. When a man named Moussa Kadri lunged at him with a knife, shouting “I’m going to kill you,” the authorities, in a moment of Orwellian inversion, used that violence against Hamit as proof that Hamit was guilty of causing disorder.
Kadri, astonishingly, was spared jail time. Hamit, meanwhile, was forced into hiding, receiving death threats from extremists.
It is hard to overstate the lunacy of this logic. If we punish the protester for being attacked, we hand veto power over public expression to the most easily offended and the most willing to be violent. As the Free Speech Union rightly warned:
“Had the verdict been allowed to stand, it would have sent a message to religious fundamentalists up and down the country that all they need to do to enforce their blasphemy codes is to violently attack the blasphemer, thereby making him or her guilty of having caused public disorder.”
This was not just a miscarriage of justice. It was a constitutional farce, a moment when the state, through moral cowardice, nearly surrendered its monopoly on reason to the mob.
The Crown Court’s Reversal — and Its Significance
Thankfully, the Crown Court has restored a measure of sanity. It has overturned Hamit’s conviction, making clear that the right to protest — even protest that shocks, offends, and blisters the sensibilities of believers, must be protected.
“Instead, the Crown Court has sent the opposite message — that anti-religious protests, however offensive to true believers, must be tolerated.”
This is exactly as it should be. A liberal democracy is not a safe space. It is a marketplace of ideas, some noble, some vile, all subject to the test of open debate. You can’t have that marketplace if certain ideas are protected by law from criticism or symbolic rejection.
Serious Questions for the CPS
And yet, serious questions remain for the Crown Prosecution Service.
“The CPS has serious questions to answer about how and why he came to be prosecuted in the first place.”
Who decided that burning a book as a form of protest was tantamount to hate speech? Who decided that the correct response to mob outrage was to prosecute the person attacked rather than the attacker?
The CPS should remember that its job is to uphold the law, not the sensibilities of the easily offended.
The Triumph of Free Minds
This is, ultimately, a major victory for free speech. It is a victory not just for Hamit Coskun, but for every artist, writer, comedian, dissident, and plainspoken citizen who refuses to bow before the altar of outrage.
So: well done Toby Young and the Free Speech Union. You fought for principle when others ducked for cover. You defended the oxygen that keeps democracy alive, the right to offend, to dissent, to challenge sacred cows, and to tell the mob: “You do not rule us.”
In an age of digital dogpiles and bureaucratic cowardice, that’s nothing short of heroic.
Find out more at: https://freespeechunion.org
By Jack Lions
