“Be alert to how governments transform human rights into criminal offences”: Dr Lambros Fatsis responds to charges against Kneecap's Mo Chara

Mo Chara, member of the Northern Irish rap group Kneecap, was charged with a terror offence by the Metropolitan Police in May.

The charge comes after an incident at one of their concerts London in which he allegedly displayed a flag in support of proscribed organisation Hezbollah and chanted a controversial anti-Conservative refrain.

Mo Chara appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Wednesday 18 June, where he was released on unconditional bail until his next hearing on 20 August. This hearing came 10 days before Kneecap’s concert in Glastonbury.

Speaking at an event at City St George’s, the BBC’s Director-General Tim Davie said that the BBC would reserve judgement about whether or not they would air Kneecap’s performance until they saw the performance, with any coverage subject to BBC editorial guidelines.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told The Sun that their upcoming concert at Glastonbury was not “appropriate”.

Dr Lambros Fatsis, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at City St George’s, University of London, specialises in cultural criminology with research expertise on the criminalisation of public culture.

As a member of the activist group Art not Evidence, he has provided expertise on debates around the policing and the criminalisation of Black music subcultures. He is also regularly called upon to act as an expert witness in criminal trials that use rap and drill music as evidence.

Dr Fatsis said:

Kneecap’s Mo Chara being charged with a terrorism offence sets a dangerous precedent for hypocritical and authoritarian responses to political criticism.

Governments should not decide which forms of creative expression are genuinely dangerous. Who governments define as terrorists and who they don’t reveals their own ideological priorities and political agendas rather than neutral objective realities.

We should be very alert to how and why governments transform human rights and civil liberties into criminal offences, using ‘the law’ to threaten fundamental human rights like the right to dissent, protest and political opposition.

We should also question who governments have historically defined as terrorist groups: e.g. anti-colonial, national liberation movements like the National Liberation Front in Algeria, the Vietcong in Vietnam, or the African National Congress in South Africa.

We deny this ‘offence’ and will vehemently defend ourselves.

This is political policing.

This is a carnival of distraction

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