For the second time this year, the United Kingdom’s broad and problematic public order laws have been turned into de facto “blasphemy” acts, critics say.

And for the second time this year — you won’t be surprised to note — the British courts decided to use the power of the Crown to punish a man who happened to “blaspheme” one particular religion.

Can you guess which? C’mon, just guess. I’ll give you a hint: not Christianity. Or Judaism. Or Hinduism. Or Buddhism. Or the Bah’ai faith. Or Jedi-ism, which is a real thing in the U.K.

Yes, yet again, insult to Islam is the reason why a man who burned the Quran outside the Turkish Consulate in February is facing a fine because he “used disorderly behavior within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment,” a court decided.

Hamit Coskun, a 50-year-old Turkish-born-born documentarian of Kurdish and Armenian descent will be fined £240 with a surcharge of £96, which is $454 in free speech cash (i.e., U.S. dollars).

Coskun was, before this, most famous for being detained by the now-deposed government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria while making a film in 2012 and held for 70 days. His book about the ordeal, which translates to “70 Days’ Captivity in Syria,” was released in 2015.

Given his history — the Kurdish and Armenian people do not have a particularly good relationship with the Islamic authorities in numerous states, particularly Turkey, and his detention and torture by Assad’s goons — he is perhaps given a bit of leeway in terms of anger toward certain precepts of the religion in general and Turkey’s application of them in particular.

That being said, his behavior outside the Turkish Consulate in London on Feb. 13 was not exactly, shall we say, exemplary: “he set fire to a copy of the Qu’ran and held it aloft while he shouted, ‘F*** Islam’ and ‘Islam is religion of terrorism’ and ‘Qu’ran is burning’, and at the time of doing so, and in doing so, he was motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam, based on their membership of that group,” court documents read.

In a column for the U.K. Spectator on the day the verdict was handed down, June 2, columnist David Shipley declared “England now has a blasphemy law.” From his piece:

This law has been created by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and District Judge John McGarva. Between them they have prosecuted and found a man guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ because he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate. The CPS mounted a prosecution conflating the religious institution of Islam, with Muslims as people, and a British judge has accepted this. Islamic blasphemy codes are now being enforced by arms of the British state, via what the National Secular Society describes as ‘a troubling repurposing of public order laws as a proxy for blasphemy laws’.

Hamit Coskun burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in February, before being attacked by a man named Moussa Kadri who has since pleaded guilty to the assault. Mr Coskun was initially charged under the Crime and Disorder Act with ‘intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam harassment, alarm or distress’. This means that the Crown Prosecution Service were treating Islam itself as a person, and a victim of Hamit’s Quran burning. Under English law this is nonsensical, as only people can be harmed in this fashion, so this charge, if it had been successful, would have established a special, protected status for Islam. Weeks ago I made a Freedom of Information request of the CPS, asking in how many instances of ‘the religious institution of Islam’ appeared in recent indictments. Just this morning they responded, saying that it would take too long for them to review all the charges they had made, and that they would not comply with the FOI request.

This may be an easy interpretation, especially after a Manchester man who said his daughter was killed during the conflict with Israel pulled a similar stunt outside a memorial for the victims of the 2017 Manchester terrorist attack; that man was both considerably less famous and considerably less mentally stable than Coskun, but the particulars — down to the graphic language and the attack on him by an onlooker — were eerily similar.

In that case, the judge said that he was sorry the man lost his daughter, but “the Quran is a sacred book to Muslims and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress.”

“This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behavior,” she added, a rhetorical flourish that would have pleased both Orwell and Kafka if the implications weren’t so dire.

That case was called de facto “blasphemy” laws as well. However, in both cases, it’s kind of worth noting that it’s a bit more complex — and worse — than that.

At least in this case, as Humanists UK noted, the judge said that “I do not find that this prosecution is an attempt to bring back and expand blasphemy law.” Which is good, considering that was abolished in 2008 and last prosecuted in 1977, when the charge was levied at a gay newspaper. The last person to spend time in prison for the act was John William Gott, convicted in 1921 and a serial offender whose pamphleteering also evinced a man not in compos mentis, to put it mildly.

However, at the same time the U.K. was taking blasphemy laws off the books, they were creating a set of laws that could, under certain circumstances, be used as a roundabout way to effectuate criminal prosecution under the same principles, only with supposedly secular auspices behind them.

In 1986, the Public Order Act was enacted by Margaret Thatcher’s government. After a series of riots and protests that had turned violent, the act defined, in a rather broad manner, what could be defined as “public disorder.”

In 1998, Tony Blair’s New Labour government went a step further, enacting the Crime and Disorder Act. At the time, the legislation became internationally famous for its Anti-Social Behavior Orders, or ASBOs for short. These orders basically turned perfectly legal things into crimes by allowing the court to order people to refrain from doing certain behaviors that, while legal, were found to be disruptive.

In 2010, the BBC chronicled how ridiculous some of these orders were:

A country and western music fan was given an ASBO in January for tormenting his neighbors with Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash throughout the day.

Partially deaf Michael O’Rourke, 51, from Peterhead, was warned by the court that he risked becoming “the oldest raver in town” unless he started to turn his music down.

Meanwhile, a woman who made her neighbors’ lives hell by having noisy sex breached her ASBO four times.

That’s right: “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Jolene,” rave music, and loud, um, human extracurricular activity became criminal offenses. And herein lies the problem with the United Kingdom: While the country has an extensive common-law tradition dating back to the 13th century, it has no codified guarantee of free speech, much less an explicit constitution.

And while free speech enjoys some protections, those protections were greatly qualified by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act’s ban on “racially aggravated offenses,” which was extended to “religiously aggravated offenses” in 2001.

While the ASBO has been done away with, this part of the Crime and Disorder Act has been used in a way that could be, if you wanted to be reductionist about it, called a “blasphemy ASBO” of sorts.

Basically, if you engage in behavior which the government deems likely to cause disorder, in front of the magistrate you go. And — this should really come as no surprise — guess which religious group in the U.K. is most likely to react in a disorderly way if their holy book is desecrated and cry bigotry?

As Humanists UK noted in its media release, this was slippery slope city:

We unequivocally condemn acts of religious hatred and harassment. Many of the defendant’s views, revealed in the course of the trial, are bigoted, and all decent people would be repelled by them. Nevertheless, given that the defendant did not express anything publicly that was prejudicial against Muslims, the judgment does raise concerns. While the facts of the case are complex, we believe the judgment, and specifically the religiously aggravated charge, means that the bar to successful prosecutions in cases like this is drawn too low.

This is not a new problem — and it’s a problem that should have been anticipated when the ridiculous ASBO was ditched in 2014. Those who thought the singular problem with the Crime and Disorder Act was that part of the legislation failed to see that making generally undesirable but legitimate forms of protest actionable under the Public Order Act was the slipperiest of slopes.

Once you’ve stopped threatening prosecution for Johnny Cash, the issues it raises become a whole lot less chucklesome — and it doesn’t just stop with the religion of Islam as a protected class. Plenty of people, including David Shipley, got some mileage out of calling it a “blasphemy law.” The horrible truth is that it’s not, and that it’s potentially a whole lot worse than that.

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