GagWatch

The National Secular Society has called for a full public inquiry into the role of the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service relative to the Undercover Mosque fiasco.

Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said: “While the Police and CPS have now apologised, they have yet to explain why this apology was not issued in response to the widespread public outcry during 2007 about their targeting of Channel 4 or even to the total rejection by OFCOM of Police/CPS complaints on 19 November 2007. It had to be forced on them by the courts. The intransigence of the Police and CPS has seriously undermined public confidence in both institutions.

“We have written to both the Attorney General and the Shadow Attorney General urging a full public inquiry into how what appear to be systematic policy and procedural failures at the Police and Crown Prosecution Service led to the justice system being brought into disrepute in this way. It is essential that lessons are learned from this failure by both the police and the CPS. The debacle raises worrying questions about the motivation behind the activities apologised for, independence of the CPS, whether all parts of the community are being treated equally and whether sufficient value is being attached to freedom of the press.

Having failed to find any laws under which Channel 4 could be arraigned, the CPS and Police referred the matter to Ofcom, which completely rejected every complaint and concluded: “There appeared to be evidence that the complaints were part of a campaign.”

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