In a humiliating defeat for Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the High Court has dismissed an appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) seeking to overturn the acquittal of a free-speech activist previously convicted of burning a Qur’an.
This decision will set a precedent for freedom of expression.
The CPS appealed to the High Court in November 2025 after the Southwark Crown Court dramatically reversed the sentence of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court against Hamit Coskun, who set fire to the Qur’an outside the Turkish Embassy in London on February 13, 2025.
Coskun, a 50-year-old political refugee from Turkey, committed an “act of desecration” while driven by a “deep-seated hatred of Islam and its followers,” provoking Muslims to commit acts of violence, the CPS had argued, seeking a conviction under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.
Judge John McGarva convicted Coskun in June 2025, ruling that he had committed a “religiously aggravated” offense. However, Justice Joel Nathan Bennathan quashed the verdict in October 2025, declaring: “There is no offense of blasphemy in our law.”
Freedom of expression “must include the right to express views that offend, shock, or disturb,” even if it involves burning a Qur’an, “an act that many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive,” Bennathan emphasized, handing a victory to the ex-Muslim atheist whose mother’s family was killed in the Armenian genocide.
High Court Vindicates Qur’an Burning Activist
On February 27, 2026, Justices Mark Warby and Margaret Obi ruled in Coskun’s favor, noting that the right to freedom of expression extends to “expressive acts” and therefore covers what Coskun “did outside the Turkish consulate as well as what he said.”
Behaviour may be both “disorderly” and “likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress” and yet still not criminal because it is “reasonable,” the judges clarified. In a 14-page ruling, they said the CPS’s appeal was “essentially no more than counter-arguments offering a different perspective, or a different approach to the facts and circumstances of the [Crown Court] case.”
The CPS told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) that its case was “always that Coskun’s words, choice of location and burning of the Qur’an amounted to disorderly behaviour, and that at the time he demonstrated hostility towards a religious group.”
“There is no law to prosecute people for ‘blasphemy’ and burning a religious text on its own is not a criminal act,” a CPS spokesperson admitted. “We will not be appealing the judgment.”
The right ruling. I stood by Hamit Coskun because, while I don’t agree with burning the Quran, doing so should never be a crime.
— Robert Jenrick (@RobertJenrick) February 27, 2026
Hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money has been spent on this failed prosecution. The CPS now needs to explain why they were so determined… https://t.co/k2zc9y4EIj pic.twitter.com/HE0She6pbp
Free Speech Activists Slam CPS
Free speech campaigners mocked the CPS’s insistence that the case was not about blasphemy.
“Its own language gave the lie to that claim. Prosecutors repeatedly described the burning of a holy book as ‘desecration,’ even while denying that offence to religion lay at the heart of the prosecution,” Stephen Evans, CEO of the National Secular Society, noted. “It was an absurd submission that shames the CPS.”
“Prosecutors alleged that he had caused harassment, alarm, and distress to ‘the institution of Islam,’” Evans added. “The CPS went further still. It argued that burning a book in a residential area of central London ‘is in itself disorderly’ and ‘all the more so when the book is a holy text.’”
“This is an important decision in the name of freedom of expression. The prosecution created many problems, but the outcome was as we expected. This decision will set a precedent for freedom of expression,” Coskun told FWI.
“Islam, established under the guise of ‘religion,’ is an ideology focused on jihad and terrorism. It is imperative to bravely fight and resist it. Otherwise, we will succumb to the invasion of Islam,” he warned. “Islam is an ideology that aims to annihilate everyone who is not Muslim by declaring them infidels. The Qur’an also guides the actions of these jihadist terrorists.”
Two Muslims attacked Coskun while he was burning the Qur’an. Moussa Kadri assaulted the activist with a knife, and a delivery driver kicked Coskun after he fell to the ground. Kadri was freed in a “travesty of justice,” after Circuit Judge Adam Hiddleston made “excuse after excuse” for him, The Spectator remarked. Coskun was moved to a safe house following death threats.
CPS To Proceed With the Prosecution of Another Qur’an Burner
The Free Speech Union, which represented Coskun, revealed that the CPS hired one of the “most expensive” barristers in the country in order to win a conviction against Coskun.
“But this is not the end,” it warned, noting that “despite our victory in Hamit’s case,” the CPS was going ahead with the prosecution of Martin Frost, who set fire to a Qur’an in Manchester city centre in February 2025.
Frost told police he was demonstrating solidarity with Salwan Momika, an anti-Islam activist in Sweden who was murdered after burning a Qur’an. “Like Hamit, Martin was charged under the Public Order Act 1986. We believe Martin’s case should be thrown out,” the FSU stated.
“Parliament abolished blasphemy laws in 2008. Blasphemy is not an offence in English law. In Hamit’s case, the High Court was clear: public order laws cannot be twisted to reintroduce blasphemy by the back door,” it emphasized.
“Hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money have been spent on this failed prosecution. The CPS now needs to explain why they were so determined to invent a blasphemy law,” parliamentarian Robert Jenrick posted on X.
