Feckless media.
The fake media simply couldn’t care less, it’s why I call them the fake media.
H/T: Scottish Infidel
The relevance of that background to what happened can, and probably will be, debated. But the court proceedings offered several disturbing glimpses of how the law of the land can be compromised. For a start, it was only thanks to the determination of the part-time caretaker at the Finsbury Park Mosque that the two related cases – the assault committed by Rebekah Dawson’s husband and her alleged attempt to pervert the course of justice – came to court at all.
Beyond the veil: What happened after Rebekah Dawson refused to take her niqab off in court
The case of a female defendant who refused to remove her niqab vanished from headlines. But what happened next is significant
Monday 07 April 2014
If your memory is sufficiently jogged, you may recall the recent case of a female defendant who refused to remove her full-face veil in court. It prompted a predictable outbreak of public indignation and liberal soul-searching. The question boiled down to this: could, or should, an English court accommodate a woman who hid her face, citing religious precepts, in a country where the face and facial expression are regarded as key to identity?
But the case soon vanished from the spotlight as did the outrage. So you may not know what happened next. In fact, the case had a double sequel – first, at London’s Blackfriars Crown Court where the veiled woman was tried for intimidating a witness, and then, just a couple of weeks ago, at the Old Bailey. The link between the two cases was not highlighted, an omission that suggests to my suspicious mind that the powers that be did not want to make a big deal of it, lest the result prompted some unwelcome joined-up thinking.
This, though, is a single story in two parts. Part one opens at Blackfriars Crown Court in early February. The courthouse is a solid civic building of a certain age, now anachronistically marooned between the multiplying loft apartments and galleries of the Thames riverside and the patchier regeneration to the south. Little knots of smokers – casually dressed service staff and defendants’ families, so it seems – congregate on the steps; barristers come and go in their wigs and gowns. It is a curious mix.
You pass through a security arch to enter; a uniformed guard checks your bag. The pace, at 10 in the morning tends to the leisurely. Surveying the court lists, I became aware of a rather large female figure just a few feet away, and waiting. She was dressed head to toe in black; only her eyes were uncovered – to see and be seen. And as I looked, without trying to, I realised that this was she: the young woman who had refused to remove her face covering in court; the young woman who was on trial, but not for that.
Rebekah Dawson, 22, was charged with intimidating a witness and was on trial jointly with her brother. In preliminary hearings, Judge Peter Murphy had ruled that she could keep her face covered while in the dock, but that, if she testified, the veil would have to come off. Judge and jury needed not just to hear her words with their own ears, but to see her demeanour with their own eyes.
This compromise, itself not without controversy, necessitated a strange little ceremony. At the start of the day’s proceedings, and after each break, a court official would have to enter the witness box and declare under oath that she had personally checked the defendant’s identity and could confirm that it was, indeed, Rebekah Dawson. Meanwhile Dawson herself sat, still as a black pillar, on one of many rows behind the plate glass of the dock. Her brother, Mathias, was there, too.
