The Charity Commissionhas been forced to reverse its public position that charities could never again fund Cage, a group that campaigns for communities affected by the war on terror, after a hearing in the high court.
In March the regulator, which oversees 170,000 charities, intervened to choke off future funds from the voluntary sector to Cage. Two charities – the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) and the Roddick Foundation – eventually pledged not to “fund Cage either now or in the future”.
The JRCT had given Cage £270,000 between 2007 and 2014, and the Roddick Foundation granted the organisation £120,000 between 2009 and 2012. The JRCT, which at first resisted demands, claimed it had come under “acute regulatory pressure” to accept the regulator’s requirement – and had been threatened with a far-reaching investigation if it refused to comply.
In an agreed statement the commission accepted that it “does not seek to fetter charities’ exercise of discretion whether to fund the charitable activities of Cage for all time, regardless of future changing circumstances”.
In return for the undertaking, Cage – and the JRCT as an interested party – withdrew the judicial review.
The case was heard by Lord Thomas – the lord chief justice – and Mr Justice Ouseley. Lord Thomas was scathing about the disagreement not being resolved before reaching his court, saying it was “ludicrous” that it had ended up before the bench. He added: “We should have had a little more talking rather than issuing ultimatums. This dispute should never have happened.”
Adnan Siddiqui, the director of Cage, said the decision was significant for the “whole charitable sector”.
“The Charity Commission has today been forced to climb down from its previous position. Cage is grateful for the wide-ranging support it has received. This is an important vindication of our position. We know this will come as a relief to the whole charity sector and the attempt to interfere with the lawful activities of civil society has been blocked.”
A spokesman for the JRCT said the trust “welcomed the clarification that the commission does not seek to direct charities outside the scope of a formal statutory inquiry, and that it does not ask funding bodies to bind their future discretion”.
The commission said it had intervened because of the public outcry when Cage suggested that Mohammed Emwazi, believed to be the Islamic State killer known as Jihadi John, had been radicalised in part by Britain’s intelligence services.
Emwazi had sought the campaign group’s help as a student in London between 2009 and 2012, telling Cage he had been harassed by the security services. In documents produced before the court, the regulator claimed Cage had “evince[d] a disturbing and distorted view of the world, likely to be seen as offensive by the vast majority of the British population”.
However, Helen Mountfield QC, acting for the JRCT, referred to the email exchanges from board members to the commission’s head of investigations and to the chief executive as “trenchant” and “tendentious”. “There were somewhat tendentious emails from members of the board to officials,” she told the court. "[Charity Commission] officials, however, say they took the decisions independently.”
The emails, which were contained in documents laid before the court, reveal that US intelligence agents appear to have influenced the decision to investigate charitable donors to Cage – describing it as a “jihadist front”.
A day after the revelations about Emwazi the commission’s chairman, William Shawcross, a former journalist who in the past has defended torture and Guantánamo Bay, emailed fellow board members to claim that Cage was a “terrorist-supporting group”.
In an email dated 27 February 2015, Shawcross said he had “spent the last 24 hours in Washington with senior US government counter-terrorism officials” and that “one senior analyst thought it was astonishing that Cage was not long ago exposed for what it is – a jihadist front”.
Shawcross continued: “We must be robust and, where possible, be seen to be robust, to protect the reputation of the sector as well as ourselves.”
Seventy-two hours later, the JRCT was forced, it says, to cut off future funding. The Charity Commission said officials had received the emails from the board but denied they had influenced any operational decisions.
Other commission board members had similarly contacted officials, evidently exasperated that the regulator was not able to act against charities that had previously been funding Cage.
In an email on 1 March this year, Peter Clarke, who sits on the commission board and is a former head of the Met’s anti-terrorist branch, asked the commission’s head of investigations whether it was “legitimate for a donating trust [JRCT] to pick and choose in this way? It seems very strange to me that a charity could seek to justify donations to a largely odious organisation by saying that one small part of its work might be claimed to be charitable.”
Reference was also made to the fact that both charities acceded to the demands of the regulator after, the court documents show, a cabinet minister made a formal complaint to the charity commission about Cage.
On 2 March Theresa Villiers, the Northern Ireland secretary, wrote to Shawcross saying: “It is wholly unacceptable for charities supported by the taxpayer (through the generous tax treatment afforded to all charities) to be funding an extremist group like this one.”
Shawcross replied on 6 March to the Tory MP saying: “Both the Roddick Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust have ceased funding Cage and will not be doing so in the future.”
On Wednesday night a spokesperson for the commission said it regretted “that this judicial process has dragged out, consuming charitable and public funds”.
“We welcome Cage’s decision to withdraw its application for judicial review. For the Charity Commission this case was always about defending our responsibility for protecting the public trust and confidence in charity.”