British far-right political activist Tommy Robinson has been jailed for 18 months after he admitted to being in contempt of court by repeating false accusations about a Syrian refugee, according to court documents. <\/p>\n
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, admitted on Monday to breaching UK court rules 10 times. <\/p>\n
Robinson, the founder of the now-defunct anti-immigration English Defence League (EDL), was accused of repeating false allegations that caused him to lose a libel suit in 2021. <\/p>\n
The initial libel case related to Robinson making false accusations against a Syrian schoolboy who was attacked in an incident shared widely on social media. In 2018, footage emerged showing the 15-year-old \u2013 a refugee from Syria \u2013 being taunted, grabbed by the throat and pushed to the ground, as other students at his school in Huddersfield, northern England, looked on. <\/p>\n
At the time, Robinson made allegations against the teenager in a number of social media videos, which he then deleted, falsely claiming the teen attacked English girls. The far-right figurehead later admitted to posting a fake photograph purporting to show violence by a Muslim gang. <\/p>\n
At Monday\u2019s sentencing hearing, a judge at London\u2019s Woolwich Crown Court said Robinson breached court rules by publishing a film, called \u201cSilenced,\u201d on social media in which he repeated the libelous allegations. He also played the film publicly in London\u2019s Trafalgar Square at a rally of his supporters. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe breaches were not accidental or negligent or merely reckless,\u201d Justice Johnson <\/strong>said during the sentencing hearing. \u201cThere was a degree of sophistication in the breaches in that they involved the planned release of material in a manner that was designed to seek to achieve maximum coverage. <\/p>\n \u201cNobody is above the law,\u201d the judge <\/strong>added. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" British far-right political activist Tommy Robinson has been jailed for 18 months after he admitted…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9550,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9549\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}