The UK Metropolitan Police Service confirmed Monday that they charged a conservative member of the UK’s Parliament (MP), Bob Stewart, with two public order offenses. Stewart is charged with racially-aggravated speech in relation to statements he made at an incident exterior of a Bahraini embassy occasion in 2022.
Police charged Stewart with “[u]sing threatening or abusive phrases or behaviour or disorderly behaviour” in a racially-aggravated change beneath part 31(1)(c) and (5) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Stewart can be charged with “[u]sing threatening or abusive phrases or behaviour prone to trigger harassment, alarm or misery” beneath part 5(1) and (6) of the Public Order Act 1986. Police mentioned that each expenses had been introduced in opposition to Stewart regarding the identical incident, in order that the courtroom may need “discretion on the racial factor.”
In a video circulating on-line, the MP—who has been in-post since 2010—might be heard saying “get stuffed” and “return to Bahrain” to the Director of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy Sayed Alwadaei and human rights activists gathered exterior of an occasion on the Bahraini embassy. Stewart can be captured telling a heckler to “shut up you silly man” and “you’re taking cash off my nation, go away.” The incident is alleged to have occurred on December 14, 20222 in Belgravia, London.
Based on the Guardian, in a follow-up assertion, Stewart expressed his apologies for what he had mentioned. Stewart mentioned, “The protesters persistently taunted me by saying I had taken cash from Bahrain. That deeply offended me. I actually haven’t and instructed them so repeatedly.” Stewart admitted he fell for the taunts and mentioned, “I’m sorry if anybody thought I used to be being racist in any method…The very last thing I meant to be was racist as I’ve so many good Bahraini buddies.” Stewart is a former British military officer who was stationed in Bahrain within the Nineteen Sixties.
Alwadaei initially filed the grievance shortly after the December 2022 incident. Alwadaei was beforehand imprisoned and tortured in Bahrain earlier than acquiring political asylum within the UK. He mentioned:
I don’t imagine I might have been instructed to ‘return’ to the nation that violently tortured me if it weren’t for the color of my pores and skin. Nobody needs to be subjected to racist abuse, notably for holding an MP to account for accepting lavish items from one of many world’s most repressive regimes, after which performing as its mouthpiece by publicly denying its infamous and extensively documented human rights abuses which have been condemned by the United Nations.
Stewart is scheduled to look at Westminster Magistrates’ Court docket to face the costs on July 5.
Source / Picture: jurist.org