The Labour Party in its 1997 election manifesto made a commitment to provide greater protection to 'black' communities through new criminal law provisions following the murder of African-Caribbean teenager, Stephen Lawrence. This commitment was fulfilled by Jack Straw through two clauses in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. These included the first new aggravated offence of harassment and violence motivated by racial hatred and the second of criminal damage motivated by racial hatred, both of which were to carry a maximum of two additional years of custodial sentence. However, both once again fell short of extending protection to those non-ethnic religious communities that fell outside of the statutory and case law definition of 'racial group'. The implementation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“ECHR”) by the Human Rights Act 1998 (“HRA”) provided within the UK the first direct protection from religious discrimination outside Northern Ireland. The Act provided for the enforcement in UK legislation of those rights secured by the ECHR known as 'convention rights': the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to change one’s religion or belief, and the right to freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest one’s religion or belief, limited to acts of worship, teaching, practice and observance. From this perspective, it could be argued that as Muslims and other multiethnic religious communities were not afforded equal protection under existing legislation that they were subsequently being discriminated against on the basis of religion. This also seemingly appeared to contravene Protocol 12 of the ECHR: protection against discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status. However, despite 25 of the Council’s member states signing up to Protocol 12, the UK unfortunately did not, which again left the same legislative anomaly in place. Consequently, under international human rights legislation, it was extremely difficult for those Muslim communities – and indeed other multi-ethnic faith communities - that were excluded from the rightful protection afforded to monoethnic faith groups to have any recourse. Prior to 9/11 therefore, it was entirely legal in the UK to incite religious hatred against those communities and individuals that existed outside of the legal definition of 'racial group'. Following 9/11 and the anti-Muslim backlash to emerge from this and the
59 of 323