From the Daily Mail report of the first day’s hearing:
Despite a public consultation and 2020 recommendation by the Law Commission that notorious s.127 of the Communications Act 2003 was be repealed, Rishi Sunak’s government has decided to keep the anti-free speech legislation on its books. The about-turn was announced November 28th, just shy of four weeks after my Appeal was due to be heard at Southwark Crown Court, but was (again, for the second time) adjourned – because, apparently, no judge was available to hear the case…
(For some reason, comments were not enabled for this post, now corrected.)
Original post:
It took almost two years for police to respond, half-heartedly, to reports submitted in 2014 on advice from the Musician’s Union, for harassment of me by Ambrosine Chetrit of “Eye on Antisemitism.” As well as creating sockpuppet accounts to stalk and harass, Chetrit incited her followers to abuse me; hate mail and death threats were sent to my address; my close family members were also openly targeted.
Despite plenty of hard evidence of a vicious smear campaign and deliberate course of action intended to cause me harm, police obviously weren’t interested.
In 2015, Chetrit also colluded with Campaign Against Antisemitism “CAA” Enforcement Officer, Steve Silverman, then trolling under a vulgar nom de guerre, “Bedlam Jones”. As advised by police themselves, I kept reporting the abuse. To no avail.
Presumably, it was the over-excitement of appearing for the first time in Court to testify against me, in December 2016, that caused Silverman to commit a game-changing gaffe.
In a signed witness statement submitted to Court by CAA’s then solicitor, Stephen Gilchrist, Silverman’s comment, in brackets, — that I have “remarkably” correctly guessed the Twitter account he used, — is wholly incriminating. (The account has since been renamed to @SSilvUK.) How many times did I report this account to Derbyshire Constabulary during the previous 18 months? How many times was I told by officers that this campaign of harassment of me was “under investigation by the CPS”? — Too many to count.
As noted above, both Chetrit and Silverman (and their associates) have been reported multiple times to police, initially to Derbyshire Constabulary and more recently to the Metropolitan Police Service.
Why has no action been taken to prevent further abuse of process?
Continue readingI’m back. For how long is uncertain but, for now, I am once again at liberty to express myself in my own home country. This new-found liberty is necessarily tempered by way of another upcoming trial for another satirical song, rendering the art of expression somewhat limited. I’m sure you get my drift.
Above: keeping busy with sourdough, making preserves and tending to my little garden.
Continue readingSeason’s greetings to all. Here is a brief review of 2019 that, in the end, turned out to be not so brief. The new year is fraught with the prospect of yet another upcoming spell behind bars, for singing songs. More on that later…
Peter Coulson, presiding judge at yesterday’s High Court hearing, when relying on the Crown’s citation of authorities from the 2012 Twitter joke trial (R vs Chambers), stated wrongly that, unlike YouTube videos that are available for to everyone to see, it was necessary to be registered with Twitter to see tweets. The ruling also states, also wrongly in my view, that – as with a tweet – my videos were “immediately streamed” as a result of anyone accessing them.
Also sitting, Bobbie Cheema-Grubb, admonished my barrister, Adrian Davies, for his analogy – coherent in my view – that the ‘sending’ of a message to an inanimate object, as in to a server in California, fails to come under the legislation of S. 127.
Whilst Cheema-Chubb noted that it was unhelpful to compare old forms of communication with the Internet, she appeared not to take into consideration the fact that legislation contained within S. 127 has a history dating back decades, first for ‘offensive, menacing or threatening’ letters and then for similarly abusive phone calls.
Final business of the day was an agreement between both sides, in court, that my costs were to be covered by the tax payer: a pretty clear admission that this entire farce has been a huge waste of precious court time and of public resources.
Commitment and sacrifice are the same thing. Committing oneself to the revisionist cause is perforce a self-sacrificial act, especially in countries where expression of doubt or non-belief of proven lies is unlawful. In the UK, however, revisionism is not unlawful, despite wishful thinking on the part of many of my accusers.
To recapitulate: militant Zionist NGO, Campaign Against Antisemitism, CAA, brought a private prosecution against me for a video I had originally uploaded outside English jurisdiction. After taking over and discontinuing CAA’s private prosecution, the Crown Prosecution Service, CPS, then brought two pairs of charges against me for a video containing two of my songs, (((Survivors))) and Nemo’s Antisemitic Universe in a video of a live performance of my show, Tell Me More Lies, originally uploaded to the London Forum YouTube channel, September 2016. A third charge was added for a third song, I Like the Story as it is – SATIRE, in 2017.
Interested readers can now view PDF documents of both last Monday’s Preliminary Ruling (regards “sending”, etc.) and Wednesday’s Judgement.
For those less inclined to wade through pages of text and case law quotations, certain paragraphs have been selected and reproduced below, with emphasis added.
A meagre yet nonetheless revealing Subject Access Request (SAR) has finally arrived from Derbyshire Constabulary. The most important revelations are as follows:
Reports against me all were made to local forces outside Derbyshire. In simple terms, therefore, I am being forced to carry out Serf Labour as “payback” to a community that has no complaint against me. Indeed, there exists (thankfully) not a single synagogue within the entire county.
The SAR confirms (finally) that I did indeed deliver more anonymous post (including another, unopened “greetings card”) to Glossop police station shortly before I was first arrested November 2016. The officer in charge at the time had expressly asked me not to open any more of these greetings cards before handing them over to police. Why wasn’t this unopened card sent for DNA testing? Why was this case only partially investigated and why was this new evidence not taken into account? Why was I suddenly informed that the investigation had been dropped a week before I was the one being arrested for alleged harassment of the suspected sender and why was this person never interviewed by local police? – The SAR states categorically that my reports concerning this particular individual span a period of over 28 months.
The SAR also contains a short report of the interview I gave to police after my first above-cited arrest. Why did the CPS Counter Terrorism Unit prosecution barrister, Karen Robinson, then claim in court March 2018 that a second interview I gave in October 2017 was the first time I had ever been interviewed by police about my songs? What happened to the process of full disclosure?
A number of reports from the usual suspects are vaguely alluded to, one of which accuses me of “selling a CD” of my songs! It appears that Derbyshire police weren’t too fond of the idea of having me re-arrested for alleged breach of my bail conditions throughout most of 2017, despite reports coming thick and fast. Perhaps that’s why the Met was sent to do the dirty work outside court, October 2017, resulting in two nights in the cells and then bizarrely, according to the SAR, two days later “all charges dropped” by my own local force?
In a High Court ruling this week, Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) lost a judicial review attempting to force the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to prosecute a pro-Palestinian leader, Nazim Ali, for a speech given by Ali after the Grenfell Tower fire. Possibly a determining factor in the outcome of my appeal next month, the full ruling can be read here.
For the fifth time in 12 months, I walked free from court again yesterday – this time in a breach trial brought against me by the National Probation Service (NPS) for refusing to comply with the slave labour part of my Suspended Sentence Order.
First off, a brief explanation is necessary regards the difference between a Community Order (CO) and a Suspended Sentence Order (SSO). As one District Judge commented in a research paper published in 2008:
‘Well, prison is an ever-present part of one isn’t it [the SSO], but not of the other, and that’s the difference in a nutshell. There’s a real threat. As I see it, a Community Order is – look, we’re trying to help you – and anything to do with imprisonment is – look, we’re trying to threaten you.’
Alison Chabloz 
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