Geoffrey Robertson QC
Defended Salman Rushdie in the blasphemy case brought against The Satanic Verses
On Valentine's Day 1989, the dying Ayatollah Khomeini launched the mother of all prosecutions against Salman Rushdie. As with the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, his fatwa was a case of sentence first and trial later.
Rushdie's difficulties brought many of his north London friends into a closer and warmer contact with officers of the Special Branch than they might ever have thought likely.
It was not long before a private prosecutor tried to issue a summons against the author of The Satanic Verses to attend, at the Old Bailey, his trial for blasphemous libel. The magistrate refused, so the prosecutor appealed to the High Court, where 13 Muslim barristers attempted to get the book banned, but their action forced them to draft an indictment against Rushdie and his publishers specifying with legal precision the way in which the novel had blasphemed.
Read Full Article »