Britain Nearly Rebuilt Blasphemy Law by Accident — an Ex-Muslim Was the Test Case

Britain abolished blasphemy law years ago. This year, its courts had to stop it returning through the side door — and the person standing in the doorway was, not coincidentally, an ex-Muslim.

Hamit Coskun, a Turkish-born atheist asylum seeker of Armenian and Kurdish heritage, staged a one-man protest outside the Turkish consulate in London, burning a Quran and denouncing Islam. He was arrested, prosecuted and convicted of a “religiously aggravated public order offence.” Whatever one thinks of his protest — and plenty of freethinkers find book-burning crude — notice what the conviction made criminal: the desecration of a religious text, prosecuted as an offence in itself. That is a blasphemy law with modern paperwork.

In February, the High Court ended the pretence. Justices Warby and Obi ruled in Coskun’s favour, affirming that freedom of expression extends to “expressive acts,” and the prosecution service was left admitting what should never have been in doubt: there is no blasphemy law in Britain, and burning a religious text is not, on its own, a crime. The right verdict — reached only after an atheist refugee had been dragged through arrest, trial and conviction for an act of protest against the ideology he fled.

Ex-Muslims will recognise the pattern, because they are its habitual test cases. Those who leave Islam and criticise it publicly sit at the exact pressure point where Western institutions are most tempted to trade principle for quiet — where prosecutors reach for public-order charges, platforms reach for hate-speech labels, and polite society reaches for the word “provocateur.” The people most likely to burn a Quran in a London street are people from whom the book was never optional. Treating their protest as a crime tells every quiet apostate watching — in Bradford, in Dhaka, in the asylum queue — that the old law of their homeland has a friendly branch office here.

The Coskun ruling is therefore worth celebrating precisely once, and remembering permanently. Courts corrected the error this time. But blasphemy law rarely returns wearing its own name; it returns as public order, community cohesion, aggravated offence. The counsel of this page’s own founding is the counsel to Britain: laws must protect people, never doctrines. A book that cannot survive burning was never holy. A freedom that cannot survive offence was never free.

Fact basis: Coskun protest outside Turkish consulate, conviction for religiously aggravated public order offence; High Court ruling 27 Feb 2026 (Justices Warby and Obi), expression extends to expressive acts; CPS statement that no blasphemy law exists and burning a text alone is not criminal (National Secular Society, Spectator, MEF). Commentary is the newspaper’s own.