UK: Lawyer wins compensation for Bin-Laden joke suspension

A British Muslim lawyer has won an apology and a record compensation payout after she was suspended for making a joke about Osama bin Laden, officials and reports said Saturday.


Halima Aziz was suspended from work by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) following the offhand remark weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.


The case has dragged on over the last seven years, but on Friday the CPS, the official prosecuting body in England and Wales, said it had offered a full apology."


The CPS also agreed to pay her 600,000 pounds in compensation, according to documents cited by Channel Four News on its Friday evening television bulletin.


Aziz made the disputed comment in October 2001, after a court guard in Bradford questioned whether she was a security threat. "I'm a friend of bin Laden's," she joked.


Following her suspension she took the case to an employment tribunal alleging racial discrimination -- that she would not have been treated similarly if she had been white -- and won the case in 2002.


The CPS appealed and the ruling was overturned in 2005 -- but a Court of Appeal decision the following year restored the 2002 verdict backing the lawyer.


(more)


Source: AFP (English)

6 comments:

wendy mann said...

its a pity my last comment was erased from this site (well i cant find it now).

anyway the issue is to understand the increasingly hostile environment it is in the uk with seemingly draconian terror laws that appear to have an ever widening usage and not just against muslims.

as for the lawyer, if the tribunal did not beleive she was entitled to that level of compensation then it would not have been awarded to her, and all allegations against her were found to be unfounded.

i wonder if the third reich treated jewish people in the same way before the later horrors of the gas chambers and mas persecution.

all in the name of course to deny the right of individuals to question the deceits that led to the iraq war.

Esther said...

Wendy mann,

your comments were not erased.

Unknown said...

I don't recall some Jews blowing buses and subways up or taking to the streets to threaten genocide, violence and mayhen, or plotting to kill democratically-elected leaders, or plotting to blow up airliners, whilst the rest of the Jewish population either ignored it or made excuses for it in Nazi Germany.

This has got nothing to do with the 'deceits' that led to the Iraq war, it's got to do with a woman who was fired presumably because with her little 'joke' about Bin Laden, her employers weren't sure whether she was one of the Muslims who were such a literal follower of Islam that she was willing to commit mass murder.

Joachim Martillo said...

Well, obviously Andrew you don't know much about Jewish history.

In the Czarist Empire Jews took the lead in assassination, terrorism, and sabotage long before the pogroms started.

In fact, Jews planned or carried out the three defining assassinations of modern Russian history:

Czar Alexander II
P.A. Stolypin (democratically elected)
Czar Nicholas II and family.

Soviet Ashkenazim planned and carried out mass murders during the Russian revolution and plotted genocide in the Ukraine. Some of the worst mass murderers of modern history have been Jewish.

In Hungary and Bavaria after WWI Jews lead communist coups that were accompanied with political murder

Starting in the 1880s Jews plotted genocide in Palestine and began terrorizing the native population in the 19-naughts. Jews started to carry out targeted assassinations in the 30s, were blowing up hotels in the 40s, and then carried out mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide on the native population.

Overall, during the early 20th century, the record of ethnic Ashkenazi is far more atrocious than that of Germans both in relative and absolute terms.

This timeline describes the record of Zionist depredations and clear Zionist intention to plunder and to dispossess Palestinian non-Jews.

The Lies of Yiddish Studies addresses the source of Jewish callousness.

Scientific Methon and Studying Judais addresses Jewish deceptions of themselves and others. (The links referenced in this blog entry contain much useful informtion.)

Esther said...

Joachim Martillo,

Obviously you don't know much about Jewish history. Or rather, you know only what you want to know.

Jews have indeed been very visible in the 1917 Revolution, just as they have been very visible in the equal rights movement in the US and in other movements to better society. There are of course Jewish mass murderers, just as there are Jewish rapists, Jewish burglars and Jewish hairdressers. However, unlike the Islamic Jihad movement - you'll be hard pressed to find Jews who kill for religious reasons and who base their entire way of life on making the world completely Jewish. (And yes, I knew there are a few out there for the former, probably none for the latter).

As for Israel - Jews were the largest religious group in Jerusalem by the 1850s. This says as much about the size of the Jewish population as it does about how few people were living there at the time. There were old Jewish communities in villages across the Galilee way before the Hasidic emigration movement in the late 1700s. The political Zionist movement, which was based on the European national model, only brought people to Israel with the aim of making a Jewish state in the late 1880s. A bit hard to explain the pogroms that took place in Israel against Jews throughout the 1800s. Of course, those Jews, being protected by the Ottoman rechstaat, had nothing to worry about.

You keep on bringing Jewish professors to base your anti-Jewish claims. I don't understand the logic. Am I supposed to think a professor is right only because he is Jewish or lives in Israel? Some of the most virulent people leading anti-Jewish and anti-Israel actions are Jews. What does that prove beyond the fact that Jews can also suffer from Judeophobia? Or maybe Jews tend to have an over-exaggerated sense of civic responsibility - it can lead them to radical revolutions and it can lead them even to promoting mass murder against their own people. This does not make any of it 'right'.

This blog, as can be seen from its name, is focused on Muslims, in Europe. Not on Jews in the US or in Israel.

wendy mann said...

Esther, my apologies.

"I don't recall some Jews blowing buses and subways up or taking to the streets to threaten genocide, violence and mayhen, or plotting to kill democratically-elected leaders, or plotting to blow up airliners, whilst the rest of the Jewish population either ignored it or made excuses for it in Nazi Germany." - andrew.

jews were part of the resistance as well as some jews perversly being part of the regime too.

however the isue is that this woman has not been part of any terrorist plot or campaign, she worked on behalf of the crown prosecution services, ie a government employee.

the fact is the lawyer was accused by a security guard that she was a security risk with no justification. i think that she had every right to be annoyed and countered in the only way possible by being sarcastic, a put down for the guards stupidity.

as with all jobsworths they become accountable for their action, he could only expand his allegations so that he would not be disciplined for his behaviour. the cps wanted this small matter to constructive dismiss the lawyer, the case was judged to be one of discrimination.

now if you are any minority, in fact if you are part of the majority you should be cheering that a victim has received justice and that due process has worked.

instead you appear to be disgruntled that she received an outcome which she was due not because of any wrongdoing but on the basis that she is a muslim.

now that is perverse and frightening about our environment today.

have we learnt anything about fascism, the nazis and the manner communities were dehumanised and eventually denied any semblance of justice?