Date published: 2008/02/13
The BBC says:
The convictions of five young Muslim men jailed over extremist literature have been quashed by the Appeal Court.
Freeing the men, the Lord Chief Justice said there was no proof of terrorist intent. The lawyer for one said they had been jailed for a "thought crime".
A jury convicted them in 2007 after hearing the men, of Bradford University and Ilford, London, became obsessed with jihadi websites and literature.
The Home Office said it would study the judgement carefully.
It said it understood the Crown Prosecution Service was considering whether to appeal against the ruling, which it must do within seven days.
...
Irfan Raja, Awaab Iqbal, Aitzaz Zafar, Usman Malik and Akbar Butt were jailed for between two and three years each by the Old Bailey for downloading and sharing extremist terrorism-related material, in what was one of the first cases of its kind.But at the Court of Appeal, Lord Phillips said that while the men had downloaded such material, he doubted if there was evidence this was in relation to planning terrorist acts.
He said the prosecution had attempted to use the law for a purpose for which it was not intended.
One small victory for human rights over the dreadful "terror" laws Tony Blair attempted to foist on the nation. If Phillips could find no evidence that the downloads were "in relation to planning terrorist acts" then it's pretty clear that the prosecution offered no such evidence. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s there were dozens of trendy books telling you how to make bombs (etc.), and if the government at the time had been able to lock up people in this way then probably half the current government would have been put behind bars.
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