Britain unable to prosecute the 'next' Anjem Choudary under current laws

Sara Khan warns extremists are targeting the vulnerable online to sow divisions

Sara Khan, the UK government's anti-extremism co-ordinator, says loopholes in the law allow extremists to operate with impunity. GARY DOAK / Alamy Stock Photo

Britain must overhaul its counter-extremism laws to ensure the authorities can tackle hate propaganda online, the UK's anti-extremism adviser said.

Sara Khan, the government-appointed envoy, wants new laws to be brought in to combat “hateful extremism” flourishing online.

She said under current laws, suspects were allowed to glorify terrorism and stoke hatred without being prosecuted.

The UK's inadequate anti-extremism laws have left authorities powerless to prosecute any successors to hate preacher Anjem Choudary, who set dozens of youngsters on the path to terrorism before he was brought to justice, Ms Khan said.

Choudary, the former figurehead of the now-banned Al Muhajiroun group, avoided prosecution for years by exploiting loopholes in the law until he was finally jailed in 2016 for encouraging support for ISIS.

The changing nature of extremism – from far-right to Islamist groups – means that the most “shocking and dangerous” extremist material can flourish, she said.

“If an Anjem Choudary figure emerged tomorrow, we would find ourselves in the same predicament,” said Ms Khan, the head of the Commission for Countering Extremism.

Authorities believe that Choudary helped persuade 70 to 100 people to become terrorists and to the frustration of police he was careful to remain on the right side of the law even as officers shut down other parts of his network.

He was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail in 2016 and released two years later, subject to strict conditions on his movements that will expire this year.

“We are at a watershed moment,” Ms Khan said. “The problem is getting worse. The government has a responsibility to address this.”

In the report, Operating with Impunity, Ms Khan cited the example of Khuram Butt, an acolyte of Choudary who became the ringleader of an attack at London Bridge that killed eight people in 2017.

Authorities were aware of Butt's views but there were no laws to stop him viewing large amounts of extremist material, including mass executions and ISIS propaganda, the report said. “Legislation outlawing possession … could have potentially allowed Butt to be picked up and prosecuted earlier,” the report said.

Since the 2005 bombings on the London transport network that killed 52 people, the UK has sought to tackle the threat but the report said “hateful extremism” has got worse. It blamed the lack of regulation for online behaviour and the use of sophisticated tactics by extremists.

Children as young as 12 are being drawn into extremist ideologies, while there is a lack of criminal sanctions against those intending to radicalise the vulnerable, it said.

An extremism bill was proposed in 2015 but never made it on to the statute book because of fears that it would have a detrimental effect on freedom of expression in the UK.

David Cameron, the prime minister at the time, said: “The fact that someone like Anjem Choudary was able to radicalise and poison the minds of so many people with such tragic consequences for so long without apparently breaking the law demonstrates that the law needs changing.”

Former UK leader of anti-terrorist policing Mark Rowley, who wrote the report, said there was now a “gaping chasm in the law” that allowed hateful extremists to operate with impunity.

He said the state of the law meant that it was legal to “hero worship” the terrorists behind the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. “The ghastliness and volumes of hateful extremist materials and behaviours in the UK at present is, even for me, truly shocking”.

The report cited the case of a suspect given the name 'Akhtar' who was arrested after the discovery of 150 ISIS propaganda videos on his personal computer hard drive.

They included graphic details of murders committed by children, beheadings and violent interrogations. They also included extracts from terrorist publications and speeches from ISIS leaders that were intended to “legitimise and glorify the terrorism and violence perpetrated” by ISIS forces.

But the report said that ‘Akhtar’ could only be prosecuted for one 29-minute video featuring a demonstration of how to kill a person with a knife and create a home-made bomb.

It met the threshold for prosecution only because it “encourages the preparation or instigation of acts of terrorist” and a clip was sent to another person via WhatsApp, the report found.

“We believe praising and glorifying terrorists and their murderous actions help create a climate that is conducive to terrorism and such extremist activity should be outlawed as part of a new legal hateful extremism framework,” the report said.

The report calls for powers banning groups who “intentionally and persistently” engage in hateful extremism.

Ms Khan said the activist group Cage – which has campaigned on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo Bay – could fall into any new law’s ambit because of its support for jailed terrorists and “highly misleading and inflammatory” comments.

Muhammad Rabbani, managing director of Cage, said that Ms Khan's commission was "calling openly for state-sponsored censorship and powers to close groups which challenge this authoritarian drift, through the use of extremely fringe examples, malicious smears and bad-faith interpretations”.