The failed prosecution of Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh tells us about the lack of seriousness in the police approach to terrorism legislation and the utter seriousness of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in trying to protect its own back.
That the prosecution was botched has now been upheld by the High Court on appeal from a decision by the director of public prosecutions (DPP)—the head of the CPS.
The DPP was appealing a detailed decision of no less than the chief magistrate of England and Wales, who had painstakingly explained why the court had no jurisdiction to try the case. The High Court agreed with the chief magistrate on every point.
The case is a catalogue of unforced errors by the police and the CPS. They only have themselves to blame for what is a clustermuck of a prosecution.
And rather than accept that errors were made, the CPS used considerable public resources to reverse the chief magistrate’s decision, resorting even to upending decades of settled case law in a way which the chief magistrate rightly described as defying logic. There was nothing the CPS would not do to give the impression that no mistake had been made.
The facts of the case are simple. On 21st November 2024, the defendant—a member of the famous rap group Kneecap—displayed a flag at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town, London. The flag was that of Hezbollah, a proscribed terrorist organisation. The intended charge was that he displayed this flag in a way or in such circumstances that he was a supporter of that organisation.
This is a serious allegation of an offence under what should be serious terrorism legislation. One would think that the police would act urgently and diligently when faced with such alleged facts. But the police did not act urgently and diligently. Indeed, for days and weeks and months, the police did nothing at all.
November turned to December, and 2024 turned to 2025, and winter turned into spring and almost summer. And then on 21st May 2025 there was apparent panic at the Metropolitan Police, exactly six months after the alleged offence. And the reason for this panic was simple: the offence in question was summary only, and thereby triable only in the magistrates’ courts, and such offences have a strict six-month time limit.
At noon on that day, the Met purported to issue a notice of criminal charge requiring the defendant to attend court the next month. There was no reason why the police should have waited until (literally) the very last minutes before issuing a charge under terrorism legislation, which is supposed to be taken by us and the police seriously.
And then late in the afternoon the next day, the 22nd May, at just after 6pm, a CPS lawyer emailed the defendant’s lawyer. It was a revealing email. The CPS lawyer had decided to reissue the charge made only the day before.
Why would this be? The reason was that the police and the CPS realised they had made an almighty mistake. The charge in the Terrorism Act was not any old summary offence where they could get away with issuing a charge on the six-month deadline.
Instead, the terrorism charge required the permission of the attorney general (or solicitor general) to “institute” the charge. And this permission had not been given before the first supposed charge of 21st May. Hence the hurried reissue of the charge the next day, once the requisite consent had been given by the attorney general.
This hectic activity on 21st and 22nd May indicates the police and the CPS knew they had a problem. If the requisite permission did not need to be given at this stage there is no sensible explanation for what they did on these days. A mistake had been made and the police and the CPS realised this at the time.
And so did the defendant’s lawyers. At the June hearing they correctly pointed out to the most senior magistrate in England and Wales that the attorney general’s permission had not been given in time and so the prosecution was void for want of jurisdiction.
The CPS was in a mess. At the hearing it dropped any reliance on the supposed reissue of the charge on 22nd May and instead formulated an elaborate case that “institution” of proceedings for this summary offence did not mean what the relevant statutes and case law said. The CPS insisted that the charge was valid and the defendant had to be prosecuted for waving a flag the previous year.
The chief magistrate was not having any of this desperate CPS floundering. The statutes and the caselaw were plain. There had been no requisite permission in time, and so the court did not have jurisdiction. As such this was not even an acquittal. It meant there was no charge to begin with.
The CPS reaction to this setback was telling. Even though there are limited resources and a general backlog in criminal proceedings, the DPP decided that the chief magistrate of England and Wales was somehow wrong in what was a straightforward case and devoted scarce resources to an appeal to the High Court, with the rarely used “case stated” procedure.
But the High Court was to be as unimpressed by the CPS case as the chief magistrate. The six-month time limit was there for a purpose and so was the need for the attorney general’s permission in terrorism cases. Neither of these things should yield to mere administrative convenience. The ruling of the chief magistrate was correct and would be upheld.
The judgment of the High Court then contained this paragraph, which is an exercise in judicial understatement, at what had happened between the police and the CPS in this case:
“It is a matter of concern that a charge which both the DPP and the Attorney General considered met both parts of the Full Code Test for Crown Prosecutors will never now be determined. There was, they decided, a realistic prospect of conviction and the prosecution was in the public interest. We have not investigated the reasons for this failure and nor do we seek to attribute blame. That is not because these circumstances are not worthy of consideration but because they are irrelevant to our decision.”
In the restrained lexicon of judicial criticism, “a matter of concern” is a considerable rebuke for this “failure”.
The police had done nothing for six months, even though this was a terrorism matter, and then rushed through a charge without the requisite decision from the attorney general. There was then an attempt to reissue the charge even though they knew it was a day late. And the CPS, rather than accepting defeat at first instance, devoted time and resources to an appeal, even though the applicable law was long settled.
Terrorism law should be taken seriously. It is a special body of law in respect of dealing with particular threats. But the case of Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh shows two things. It shows the lack of seriousness with which the police take terrorism legislation, and it shows the utter seriousness of the CPS in trying to protect itself.
