Police chief calls for urgent guidance for forces after cover-up accusations
The pair are accused of raping of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton.
Mr Seccombe said: 'Like all forces, Warwickshire Police finds itself in a difficult position of trying to carefully balance the legal safeguards which protect the integrity of the judicial process, while maintaining public order and simultaneously ensuring that public confidence is maintained through transparency and honesty.
'Currently police forces are in an invidious position when deciding what can and should be disclosed in sensitive cases, given that the national guidance is silent on both the ethnicity and immigration status of suspects.
'It is very easy to criticise and suggest that the balance of disclosure hasn't been correct, but it is much harder to take these decisions on the ground.'
On Wednesday, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said police should reveal more information about suspects, and that guidance to police was already being looked at.
But she added it was an 'operational decision' for forces and the Crown Prosecution Service over what information to release.
She said: 'However, we do think that the guidance needs to change, the College of Policing is already looking at this, and Home Office officials are working with the College of Policing.'
The Nuneaton case has led to fresh pressure on police over the information they make public.
The Southport atrocity committed by Axel Rudakubana in July last year was marked by a focus on the suspect's ethnicity and immigration status, with false rumours spreading online that he was a Muslim asylum seeker, fuelling riots after the stabbings.
Mr Seccombe added: 'It is imperative that police forces have revised guidance as soon as possible, so everyone has the clarity needed on what information will be released, when it will be released and by whom, for any incidents going forward.'
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Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
My victory over Mohammed Hijab
One of the occupational hazards of being a journalist is being hounded by litigants. Indeed, one of the reasons why much of the media finds it easier to report fluff than to write about difficult issues is that the latter can be costly in terms of money, as well as time. Three years ago I wrote a column in this magazine about some of the downsides of diversity. At the time there had just been serious disturbances in Leicester between local Hindus and Muslims. One of the people who decided to throw himself into the middle of that trouble and to try to make things worse was an online pugilist known as Mohammed Hijab. Hijab had already been filmed intimidating Jews in Golders Green and whipping up a crowd of masked men outside the Israeli embassy in London. In Leicester he chose to make a derogatory speech about Hindus to a crowd of men and then picture himself leading a 'Muslim patrol' in the city. After I pointed this out, Hijab tried to sue me and The Spectator. I retained the excellent Mark Lewis as my lawyer and for years, along with the magazine's brilliant legal team RPC, we watched Hijab perform every known legal and rhetorical contortion. Hijab's lawyers repeatedly dragged out their case, avoided every opportunity to drop it and insisted not only that what I had written was untrue, but that Hijab had suffered serious emotional and mental distress, as well as financial loss, as a result. Hijab seemed to think that he could use the courts not just to pursue me but to debate me. Last month the case was heard in London before Mr Justice Johnson. Many of Hijab's witnesses failed to show up, claiming ill health or having appeared to have skipped the country. Hijab himself spent several days in the witness box. This week the judge delivered his verdict. Mr Justice Johnson found that what I had said in my article was accurate, that Hijab had hurt his own reputation more through his actions and social media posts than I could ever have done with my article, and that the number of lies Hijab told in court were so numerous that his 'evidence overall is worthless'. The judgment also noted that as well as being 'combative and constantly argumentative' when cross-examined by my barrister and The Spectator's barrister, Hijab also demonstrated a 'palpable personal animosity' towards your columnist. The judgment found that Hijab lied about events in Golders Green – which he refused to accept was a Jewish area. It found that he had lied about his demagogic and dangerous actions outside the Israeli embassy in London, that he had lied about events in Leicester, and that he had lied about – and indeed appeared to have concocted – his claim of lost earnings. These lost earnings were alleged to have come from three Muslim organisations, including a supplements company called Nature's Blends. All claimed to have been big readers of my Spectator column, as indeed, Hijab alleged – causing him yet more hurt – was a receptionist at his local gym. Witnesses to his alleged financial loss failed to attend court. Another – Mr Wasway from Nature's Blends – had to try to explain his recent conviction and time spent in prison for making false court claims after staging car accidents. Not many law case reports make good reading in their own right, but this one does. No doubt Hijab will bluster that the findings are unfair and anti-Islamic – just as he tried to claim in court that Tommy Robinson, Benjamin Netanyahu and myself are three examples of non-Hindu Hindu extremists. But the judge in the case said far more against Hijab than I ever did. In court Hijab boasted of having sued other publications. He seemed proud of trying to bully the press, as well as the courts. But time and again he could not stop himself from lying. He claimed that his demagogic street speeches were attempts to publicly debate 'theology' and 'eschatology'. The judge found they were no such thing. Hijab had gone to Jewish areas on the Sabbath and a Hindu area during a volatile moment to engage in a type of vigilantism. As the judge said, Hijab 'was deliberately acting irresponsibly, raising the temperature of a volatile and potentially dangerous situation with provocative and inflammatory language'. The judge found his denials of vigilantism to be 'self-defeating' and 'untenable'. 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Indeed I know journalists who in recent years have had to spend more time dealing with their lawyers than dealing with their editors. It is inevitable that over time many editors, publications and journalists will decide to take an easier route. Hijab imagined he could use the court system to intimidate me and this magazine. He resolutely and comprehensively failed. It turned out that a London courtroom and a British judge are not X, YouTube or some other online echo-chamber. The court is a place where facts are able to come out and where lies can come out too. I am very proud that The Spectator stood up against this thug and bully, and that a judge has exposed him for everyone to see.
Spectator
2 hours ago
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Haircuts are a human right!
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Last Friday, the ECJ determined that being overwhelmed and full up did not reprieve the state from its obligations under the EU Reception Conditions Directive to provide all asylum seekers with, among other things, housing, food, clothing and education for minors. Therefore, having been cheated of such provisions, the petitioners are likely due compensation. Why, those 71 days of Down and Out in Dublin could really pay off. So no matter how limitless an inundation of indigent foreigners and how finite their own resources, European states literally owe nationals from all over the world a living. Because housing is a 'human right'. (Certainly it's a human right according to the New York Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, who hopes to extend the city's hitherto ruinously universal 'right to shelter'.) Food is a 'human right'. Healthcare is a 'human right' (often extending to sex-change operations). The umbrella of 'human rights' does nothing but expand and now protects not merely citizens but anyone from anywhere who rocks up on your patch. Imagine, then, that you were born in a rural area of an African country whose political rhetoric isn't so loftily supranational. If you don't scratch a few mouthfuls from your parched smallholding, you don't eat. Your 'accommodation' wouldn't naturally command such a grand label: a grass-roofed hut with a mud floor. Inside you cook on an open fire, the smoke from which is ravaging your lungs. Second-rate healthcare may be available only after a long, expensive journey. Education for your children requires school fees you may not be able to afford. Anyone in such circumstances who hears tell of a place where all these basic needs are 'human rights' even for foreigners and doesn't hightail it to such a Valhalla would have to be stupid, lazy or crazy. Brits shouldn't feel smug about no longer being required to follow the likes of the EU Reception Conditions Directive (yet; give our friend Sir Keir a bit more time), because in the UK asylum seekers are due not just free room and board, but often luxury hotel digs – with four-poster beds, video games and all-you-can-eat buffets – as well as group outings to the circus and safari parks. For British asylum seekers, even Netflix and Disney+ are 'human rights'. Funnily enough, Whitehall doesn't consider such subscriptions human rights for its own citizenry, some of whom, astonishingly, have to pay for them. This human rights business is a bigger issue than its influence on immigration. Is it really the case that the world, or at least your government, owes you a living from the off? At this point, too, maybe we should be asking what's not a human right. In fact, many folks seriously argue that access to the smartphones and the internet is now a human right. Well, we all grow hair. So shouldn't haircuts be a human right? Electricity, clean running water and indoor plumbing? If so, why should anyone pay utility bills? In both British and American cities, the effective decriminalisation of shoplifting – which progressives justify as the poor's response to 'inequality' – means just about any off-the-shelf good is a human right. Razor blades. Turtlenecks. Mayonnaise. A human right is anything you happen to need. Bloated welfare rolls suggest that opting for benefits in Britain has become a lifestyle choice. Taking advantage of a host of programmes, Americans, too, can amass more in state support than the average wage. But isn't that nice? Haven't we created a better world, in which everything is free and work is elective? That way you only take a job if it's fun. Alas, gifting sweeping human rights to some people takes other people's human rights away. Requiring the state to provide all-comers with housing, food, clothing, healthcare and, yeah, maybe even haircuts implicitly demands that the state requisition these resources from the few suckers who still work for a living. The suckers are punished twice: they provide their own basic needs – even their own safari park tickets! – and then they provide the basic needs of everyone else. Eventually the smarter dray horses will stop hauling the cart and jump in the hay wagon, too. The western welfare state disables the survival instinct – or at least reroutes it from foraging in the forest to foraging on governmental websites. State dependents apply all the cunning, ingenuity and resourcefulness they might otherwise have employed to keep body and soul together in a more Darwinian social landscape to filling out forms, researching on TikTok what phrases to use in Zoom interviews with bureaucrats and maximising motability schemes. This is where I'm supposed to add: 'Of course, advanced societies shouldn't let people starve!' But maybe this ostensibly unquestionable precept has sown the seeds of our destruction. A handful of genuinely hungry people could be usefully cautionary. Western refusal to house, feed and clothe every newcomer might encourage more would-be immigrants to make a go of things where they are. And without handouts, you can bet most of those anxious and depressed young people currently swelling the disability rolls would figure out how to obtain a sandwich before they fainted from malnutrition.
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
Calls for clarity over whether UK police can release suspects' ethnicity and immigration status
Yvette Cooper is facing demands for clarity over the information that police forces are permitted to release to the public after claims of a 'cover-up' by the authorities over the immigration status of men accused of raping a child. The Warwickshire police and crime commissioner, Philip Seccombe, called for fresh national guidance after police were accused by Reform UK of failing to confirm that two Afghan men being prosecuted for the alleged attack on a 12-year-old girl were asylum seekers. There is increasing pressure on prosecutors and the police to release details about the ethnicity and immigration status of people facing a criminal charge. Cooper, the home secretary, said on Tuesday that the guidance should change to permit police to release the ethnicity or immigration status of criminal suspects but added that she was waiting for a review to be concluded by the Law Commission. Seccombe said: 'Like all forces, Warwickshire police finds itself in a difficult position of trying to carefully balance the legal safeguards which protect the integrity of the judicial process, while maintaining public order and simultaneously ensuring that public confidence is maintained through transparency and honesty. 'Currently police forces are in an invidious position when deciding what can and should be disclosed in sensitive cases, given that the national guidance is silent on both the ethnicity and immigration status of suspects. 'It is very easy to criticise and suggest that the balance of disclosure hasn't been correct, but it is much harder to take these decisions on the ground.' The alleged rape, said to have happened on 22 July, has become the centre of a political storm after the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, on Monday amplified claims of a police cover-up. On Tuesday the leader of Reform-led Warwickshire county council said police were refusing to confirm details of the two suspects charged after the alleged attack in Nuneaton. George Finch, the youngest council leader in England, alleged within days that Ahmad Mulakhil and Mohammad Kabir – the two men charged in the case – were asylum seekers, but police forces do not routinely release the immigration status of suspects. In a letter to Cooper, Finch claimed the police risked 'disorder breaking out on the streets' of the county. Cooper said on Tuesday that 'we do want to see greater transparency' from police forces and she wanted national guidance to change in relation to the release of information about suspects. Mulakhil has been charged with two counts of rape, while Kabir has been charged with kidnap, strangulation and aiding and abetting of the rape of a girl aged under 13. Both men are in custody and due to appear at Warwick crown court on 26 August. Warwickshire county council's chief executive briefed Finch confidentially about the immigration status of the two men, according to a letter by the force's chief constable, Alex Franklin-Smith. Franklin-Smith said he confirmed to Finch last Thursday that this information was accurate but that 'we wouldn't be releasing immigration status at point of charge as we follow national guidance'. The police chief said he had asked the Home Office to confirm the full immigration status of the two men, given that Finch had released some details publicly. He added: 'I am confident that Warwickshire police has treated this investigation seriously from the outset, working tirelessly to identify, locate, arrest and charge those suspected of being responsible for this awful crime as quickly as possible.' A Home Office spokesperson said: 'As the home secretary said yesterday, it has been widely reported that this case involves two Afghan individuals who are in the asylum system, some of which information has already been confirmed in open court. 'The home secretary has made clear that there is a strong public interest in maximum transparency wherever that is possible. 'That is why the Home Office and College of Policing are working together to strengthen and clarify the guidance around how and when information is released.'
