Politician to appear in Jersey Magistrate's Court for 'alleged offences under the Immigration Act'
A longstanding Jersey politician has announced that he is facing criminal charges.
Deputy Philip Ozouf - who previously served as the island's Assistant Chief Minister - read out a personal statement at the opening of Wednesday's States' meeting to say he is due to appear in the Magistrate's Court at the end of this week.
He says it is in connection with alleged offences under the Immigration Act, relating to the employment of Rwandan nationals.
He added: "Given that this matter is subject to judicial proceedings, I will not be making any further comment at this time - except to confirm that I will cooperate fully with the process."
Deputy Ozouf extended his apologies as one of the island's most experienced politicians.
He said: "As a long-serving member of this Assembly, fully cognisant of the need to uphold the highest standards of conduct in both public and private life, I express regret that this matter has arisen and how it may reflect on this Assembly.
"I express a similar regret to my constituents in St Saviour."
The specific charges faced by Deputy Ozouf are not known.
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Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Britain's tortured relationship with free speech – from public floggings to gender ‘hate crime'
Many readers will know the neat witticism that begins 'In England, everything is permitted unless it is forbidden' and ends 'In Russia, everything is forbidden, especially when it is permitted'. It flatters a certain idea we have of ourselves as both law abiding and free. But it also gives an insight into our present problems over freedom of speech and thought – which include police targeting social media users for ' non-crime hate incidents ' while prominent musicians call for the death of Israeli soldiers live on the BBC, with apparent impunity. We do not have a clear, familiar and authoritative guarantee of freedom. Many countries do. The most famous is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: 'Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.' In France, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man (incorporated into later constitutions) described freedom of expression as 'one of the most precious' human rights. Germany, Spain and others have constitutional protection for freedom of expression. Our freedom, in contrast, relies on gaps in the law: what is not forbidden. There is no mention of freedom of speech in Magna Carta, needless to say, or in the 1689 Bill of Rights (other than the Bill of Rights setting out protections for parliamentarians over what was said during debates) – though even if there were, it would not be binding on today's courts. The consequence is that our freedom of speech, writing, discussion and even of thought relies on ever-changing and often hasty legislation and on court interpretation; hence, in reality, it is subject to changes in cultural norms, ideological fashions and political opportunism. I do not think that England or Britain can claim to have an established history of freedom of expression, and we certainly cannot be secure today in enjoying whatever freedoms we have. If we take a long view of history, the idea that freedom of expression is good in principle is fairly new. Heresy was made a capital crime in 1401 and moreover was a very unpopular offence, like possessing pornographic images of children today: wives denounced their husbands, for example. Treason – which, like heresy, could end in a very painful death – included talking or speculating about the monarch's death. Political discussion could be sedition. In Cromwell's Puritan Army, blasphemy or profanity – what today we might term 'hate speech' – was punished by having the tongue grasped in pliers and a hot iron forced through it, leaving a permanent speech impediment to remind all and sundry that speech could be sinful. When written down, thought crimes became various forms of libel and could be labelled blasphemous, obscene or seditious. These might incur a modest bit of mutilation (ears cut off) or a humiliating, painful and sometimes fatal spell in the pillory. A view developed in the 18th century (as the American and French constitutions testify) that some liberty of thought and expression might be desirable enough to exalt to the status of a universal principle. It began as an acceptance of the inevitable: an intellectual truce after generations of religious conflict had shown that unity of speech, thought and belief could not be imposed, even with hot iron. The end of print censorship in England came in 1689, when the law imposing it accidentally lapsed, and it seemed better thereafter to let sleeping dogs lie. Sensible Queen Anne kept losing the paperwork when her bishops brought prosecutions for heresy. Charles II had reopened the theatres – closed under Cromwell – but Sir Robert Walpole imposed censorship of plays by the Lord Chamberlain. England during this century was nevertheless, by comparison with most of its neighbours, a haven of free thought and expression. Yet when the self-promoting London radical John Wilkes (perhaps a distant forerunner of Nigel Farage) insisted on satirising the prime minister and publishing the hitherto secret debates in Parliament, he was prosecuted for obscene and blasphemous libel (in a rude poem featuring bishops), almost killed in a duel, forced to flee into exile and outlawed – pretty comprehensive evidence of the limits of Enlightenment liberty. The 19th century in some ways saw a tightening of the limits of free expression. Though the state no longer imposed draconian penalties for political criticism, and religious diversity was at last fully recognised, the general cultural atmosphere became less permissive. A Russian exile observed that 'the freer a country is from government interference, the more intolerant grows the mob'. This reflected a collective effort to civilise and regulate a turbulent and rapidly changing society through education, exhortation, economic pressure and, not least, strict policing. Churches, charities, political parties and trade unions were all agreed on the desirability of morality, self-reliance, discipline – in short, respectability. Leading socialists became advocates of forced labour for the unemployed and enthusiasts for eugenics. We might admire some of the outcomes: crime, drunkenness and domestic violence fell to probably their lowest ever levels. The economy boomed. Living standards rose. But it had become a stern and forbidding society compared with the uproarious 18th century. Respectability imposed strict limits on what could be said and written. In the 1880s, a radical reformist movement including socialists and feminists started cracking down on immorality. This included stricter regulation of music halls, the seizure and destruction of immoral pictures, sexual repression (especially of prostitution and homosexuality) and, of course, baleful scrutiny of publications. In 1889 the publisher of English editions of Émile Zola's novels was sentenced to three months in prison. A series of French paintings of scenes from François Rabelais, the French humanist, was narrowly saved from being destroyed, and there were scandalised protests when Degas's L'Absinthe was shown in 1893, depicting the dangers of a highly alcoholic spirit that was later banned. Artists and writers flocked to France, where all censorship had been abolished. Victorian repressiveness did not, of course, end with Victoria. In the 1930s the legal writer AP Herbert wrote, only half jokingly, of 'the curious delusion that the British subject has a number of rights and liberties which enable him to behave as he likes… There are few if any such rights', in particular 'the alleged rights of public meeting and free speech' based on 'the vague belief that this ideal is somewhere embodied in the laws of our country'. Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park was often shown off as a proof of freedom of speech, but of course it was a licensed exception. The director of public prosecutions sent detectives to lectures of the Cambridge literary scholar FR Leavis when he spoke of James Joyce's Ulysses. The 1950s saw a revival of Victorian values. Magistrates ordered the destruction of more than 1,500 works of fiction, including Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, published a century earlier. The BBC did not permit anything 'derogatory to political institutions' or the impersonation of 'leading public or political figures'. The sensational acquittal in 1960 of Penguin Books for publishing DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover ('Is it a book you would wish your wife or your servants to read?' asked the prosecuting counsel) has rightly been seen as a landmark. But the acquittal was based not on a right to freedom of expression, but because the book was seen as a work of literary merit – effectively a get-out clause in the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. Less distinguished literature was successfully prosecuted: the underground magazine Oz in 1971 (its editors were given prison sentences, later overturned), and Gay News for blasphemous libel in 1976 (fines and a suspended prison sentence). This was the last prosecution for blasphemy, at least for the time being (the common law offence of blasphemy was abolished in 2008). The House of Lords rejected Gay News 's appeal, and Lord Scarman suggested that the law of blasphemy should apply to all religions, punishing those who 'cause grave offence to the religious feelings of some of their fellow citizens'. Nevertheless, the three decades beginning in the 1960s were undoubtedly the greatest age of free expression in Britain. It became generally accepted in all but the most conservative circles that such freedom was both a human right and a benefit to society. The Lord Chamberlain stopped censoring plays in 1968. Toleration of ideas that one disliked was seen as a necessary part of living in a civilised country. It would have been unthinkable for writers or academics to be threatened, dismissed or discriminated against for their words or opinions. How long ago this now seems! When or why it began to end is a proper subject for debate. One obvious moment was the death sentence passed by the ruler of Iran against Salman Rushdie in 1989 for his novel The Satanic Verses, winner of the 1988 Whitbread Award. This was followed by a series of riots in Britain and elsewhere, assassination attempts and the murder of a translator of the book in Japan. Attitudes to what could be said or published rapidly changed, at first through fear and later through conformism. The golden age of free expression in Britain had lasted for roughly one generation. Most limits on free expression throughout our history have been based on the preservation of public order: in other words, on the likely or possible outcome of what was said. At one end of the scale, treason attacked the political order. Sedition risked causing riots. Slander and libel upset the social order at the individual level. Hence, it made a great difference whether the words were true or false, intended or unintended, public or private. Falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre was an offence. In the privacy of one's home it was not. It seems to me – apologies to lawyers who might disagree – that blasphemy is essentially different. While it may also be seen as an offence against public order, it is principally an offence against an angry divinity: not only a crime, but a sin. In theory, blasphemy is not yet a crime in England, nor is it regarded even as a just cause of outrage when it concerns Christianity, once its sole concern. Nevertheless, blasphemy is severely punished. Not by law – at least not yet – but by illegal or informal action. This is most obvious in the case of Rushdie, or of the teacher at Batley Grammar School who showed pupils illustrations of Mohammed, and who was forced to go into hiding with little or no support from his employers or his trade union, and, it seems, no effective protection by the police. I could list many similar cases, but they will be all too familiar to readers. The present debate in Parliament over a new definition of 'Islamophobia' raises the possibility of the reintroduction of a blasphemy law by the back door. But blasphemy now goes much further than in its traditional religious context. There is severe punishment – including loss of livelihood and reputation, threats of violence and ostracisation – for blasphemy against current secular orthodoxies too: blasphemy that is termed 'hate speech' or various kinds of 'phobia'. An innocent remark taken the wrong way can destroy a career. An angry or sarcastic comment that does no material damage can result in prosecution or worse. The use, even inadvertently, of particular words is punished even though not illegal. Implausible claims of being harmed or made 'unsafe' by ideas or words have been used to attack individuals and silence debate. Certain police forces have been leading exponents of anti-blasphemy activism in their dubiously lawful pursuit of 'non-crime hate incidents'. The law is encroaching into the private realm, including overheard conversations. For example, how will employers, made liable for the harassment of their employees by third parties under the new Employment Rights Bill, prevent such abuses without deploying an army of snoopers? This eagerness to extend law into private spaces recalls Scotland's Presbyterian Kirk, with its 'searchers' of vices and its 'stools of repentance' – the most intrusive and repressive form of Christianity, which the SNP seems eager to revive for 21st-century use. Far more widespread than repression by governments is action taken by angry individuals and groups operating outside the law. They sometimes act with the complicity of official bodies, but often independently. Prominent have been lecturers, graduate students, publishers, diversity lobbyists, civil servants and trade unionists. Their reach has been extended by social media far beyond that of Victorian morality campaigners or 17th-century Puritans, though their psychology and vindictiveness seem amazingly similar. An individual accused of modern forms of blasphemy often has no legal protection and no redress. Like many readers, no doubt, I have personal knowledge of several cases of such persecution. I know how common intimidation and self-censorship has become in academic circles. Until recently, the only defence of people hounded out of their jobs for their opinions has been to seek compensation before an industrial tribunal. Those censored, 'cancelled' or otherwise penalised (for example by loss of contracts or denial of funding) have usually had no redress at all. For these reasons, to rely as in the past on a permissive void in the law – that everything is permitted if it is not legally forbidden – is evidently insufficient. It is no longer enough that freedom of expression should be permitted. It also has to be defended. That the law has not been fairly or equally applied in recent years is widely believed, and although such 'two-tier' justice is, alas, pretty standard throughout history, it is always an abuse – as Magna Carta so memorably declared 800 years ago. All those who value individual liberty and freedom of expression as the foundation of a civilised and functioning society must work to make the state and the law the active champions of freedom and not, as often, its enemies, not least through loosely drafted legislation that lends itself to repressive applications. The Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson learnt the hard way how such laws – in her case invoking the 'perception' of an unknown 'complainant' – could be used to intimidate critics of the police. An important step to defend freedom has been taken with the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, passed under the previous government and applied, with regrettable reluctance and watered-down provisions, by the present Government. The philosopher and free-speech campaigner Prof Arif Ahmed was appointed director for freedom of speech and academic freedom at the Office for Students, and has already taken firm action to require universities to 'protect and promote' freedom. Significantly, ideological tests for employment and promotion are no longer to be imposed by universities – amazing that this should be needed when the Test Acts (discriminating against religious dissenters in education and employment) were abolished in the 19th century. Universities have a special importance as pillars of freedom of speech, expression and thought. But they are not, of course, alone. Stronger protection for freedom of opinion is needed in other institutions and professions. It is a lamentable proof of the inadequacy of legal protection when medical professionals can be harassed or even dismissed for publicly upholding biology or resisting damaging treatments. In many and varied public institutions, it is unlikely that anyone would be employed in the first place if they were known to dissent from progressive orthodoxy – in other words, to share views held by the majority of the population. Such are the punishments for modern blasphemy. There is a long and hard road to follow before widespread damage done by activist minorities – sometimes taxpayer-funded – can be undone. But the indispensable first step must surely be to protect freedom of speech so that error and falsehood can at least be contested without risking dismissal or ostracism. England should be a country where 'what is not forbidden is protected'.
Metro
9 hours ago
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'Racist' bonfire with migrant dummies on a boat set on fire
A bonfire with a display of refugees in a boat was lit and is being treated as a hate incident. The model which shows a small boat with several figures inside has received widespread condemnation after it was set alight in Moygashel, Northern Ireland, last night. Under the boat, a sign said 'stop the boats', while another placard said: 'veterans before refugees'. Among those to hit out at it was Church of Ireland Archbishop John McDowell who said it was 'racist, threatening and offensive.' He added: 'It certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity or with Protestant culture and is in fact inhuman and deeply sub-Christian. 'I hope that the many people from other countries, who live in that area, and who contribute so much to the economy and to the diversity of Dungannon, can be reassured that it does not in any way represent the feeling of the vast majority of their neighbours.' Other critics include Sinn Fein's Assembly member Colm Gildernew who branded it 'vile' and 'deplorable'. A number of reports to police were made about the bonfire and the material on it and they are investigating it as a hate incident. The PSNI statement added: 'Police are here to help those who are or who feel vulnerable, to keep people safe. 'We do this by working with local communities, partners, elected representatives and other stakeholders to deliver local solutions to local problems, building confidence in policing and supporting a safe environment for people to live, work, visit and invest in Northern Ireland, but we can only do so within the legislative framework that exists.' Moygashel Bonfire Committee said the bonfire 'topper' should not be seen as 'racist, threatening or offensive' and it is 'expressing our disgust at the ongoing crisis that is illegal immigration'. More Trending Bonfires like these are lit annually each year in some unionist areas across Northern Ireland in July to usher in the Twelfth of July, the main date in the parading season. The majority are lit on the eleventh night and the twelfth night commemorates the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 when the Protestant King William III defeated Catholic King James II. The Moygashel bonfire has been known for its controversial displays in the past. A mock police car was burnt on top of the bonfire last year and in 2023, a boat designed to represent the post-Brexit Irish Sea economic border was torched. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Woman charged with murder after man dies in house fire MORE: 'Beautiful and much-loved' mum and daughter, 6, killed in car crash named MORE: Rail ticket gives unlimited travel in 24 countries from £34 — but you need to be quick
BBC News
14 hours ago
- BBC News
Jersey deputy to appear at Royal Court over immigration allegations
Deputy Philip Ozouf will appear in Jersey's Royal Court later this year on charges of breaking the island's Immigration with hotel manager, Roberto Lora, 49, he is accused of helping people from Rwanda to work in places they were not entitled an appearance on Friday, magistrate, Bridget Shaw, said the matter was too serious to be dealt with in the Magistrates' men were released on bail, with the condition they do not leave the island without the court's permission.
