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English legal system and criminal law

Freedom of expression in the digital age

Andrew Mitchell considers the judgment in Miller v College of Policing and Humberside Police (2020), and examines the borderlands between human rights and the criminal law

This article is relevant to AQA A-level Paper 3, OCR A-level Component 3 and WJEC/Eduqas Components 2 and 3.

In 2019 I wrote an article on whether a sick joke (a viral video that appeared to mock the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire) could be regarded as a criminal offence (see A-LEVEL LAW REVIEW, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 28–29). The alleged creator of the video was subsequently prosecuted for the offence of sending a grossly offensive or obscene message contrary to s.127 of the Communications Act 2003, an offence for which he was eventually cleared in 2019 after criticisms of the Crown Prosecution Service’s disclosure of evidence in the case. It is an instructive example only because we now know that this would have been regarded as a hate crime had the prosecution discharged its burden of proof in the case.

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English legal system and criminal law

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