Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006
A bill outlawing incitement to religious hatred was one of the Labour party's manifesto promises during the 2005 general election. Muslim groups, including the Muslim Council of Britain, wanted the same kind of legal protection for their faith that was offered to Jews and Sikhs who were already covered by existing race hatred laws.
A high-profile campaign including writers, actors and comedians lobbied parliament to reject the bill. The movement's figurehead was comedian Rowan Atkinson who claimed the bill would restrict the right to make light of religious sensibilities. Atkinson said: "To criticise a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but to criticise their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom."
Even on its third endeavour the government failed to secure some key elements of the act. It lost a key vote to overturn two amendments introduced by the House of Lords after Labour whips miscalculated voting numbers and failed to recall a team of MPs campaigning in a local by-election. The Lords amendments limited the legislation to "A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening...if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred", thereby restricting the offences to intentional acts of stirring up religious hatred. These changes also ensured that an individual charged with an offence must be shown to have used "threatening" language – rather than the broader government clause of "threatening, insulting and abusive" language.
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However, Liberty later described the act that passed both houses as "a great improvement on the bill proposed by the government. Criminalising even the most unpalatable, illiberal and offensive speech should be approached with grave caution in a democracy. Free speech is far more precious than protection from being offended."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2008/dec/16/racial-religious-hatred-actA paper for Parliament says that, by August 2011, there had been 2 prosecutions for inciting religious hatred under the act, and one conviction, which I think was this:
In May 2010 a British student, Roshanara Choudhry, stabbed her local MP, Stephen Timms, during a constituency meeting. Her explanation to the police in interview was that she had become convinced that this was her obligation after watching videos of radical preachers, because Mr Timms had voted in favour of the war in Iraq.
On 4 November 2010 Ms Choudhry was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted murder. That same day Bilal Ahmad, a computer graduate from Nottingham, published an article on a well known extremist website based in the U.S. praising Ms Choudhry as a heroine. In this article he provided religious justification for her actions, produced a list of all of the MPs who had also voted in favour of the war in Iraq, provided instructions on how to make appointments with them and provided a link to a supermarket website which sold knives.
When the police arrested Mr Ahmad they found evidence of a considerable volume of other online activity on his laptop. These included threatening comments about Hindus posted in March 2009 on an online forum in response to a newspaper article about Muslim girls being targeted for wearing the veil to college. He was also found to have collected electronic copies of a number of terrorist publications.
On 29 June 2011, Mr. Ahmad was sentenced for soliciting murder, contrary to section 4 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861, stirring up religious hatred, contrary to section 29C Public Order Act 1986 (as amended by The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006) and three offences of collecting material likely to be of use to a person preparing or committing an act of terrorism, contrary to section 58(1)(a) Terrorism Act 2000. He received a custodial sentence of 12 years.
http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/prosecution/ctd_2011.html#a08The 'religious hatred' conviction, which appears to be for the online 'threatening comments about Hindus' was overshadowed by the 'soliciting murder' one.
The CPS report points out
Section 29J of the Act as passed:
“Protection of freedom of expression
Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
