In defence of a pro-Kremlin stooge

As a defender of free speech, I’m used to taking up the cudgels on behalf of unsavoury people. To quote Lord Justice Sedley in a famous High Court judgment in 1999, ‘Freedom of speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to provoke violence.’ But the case of Graham Phillips, who was sanctioned by the British government last month, is one of the hardest I’ve ever had to wrestle with.

Phillips styles himself an ‘independent journalist’, but it’s far from clear that the additional free-speech protections we apply to journalists should be extended to him. It would be more accurate to describe him as a pro-Russian propagandist. He’s a British citizen who’s been based in Ukraine, for the most part, since 2010, writing stories and making YouTube videos about football, prostitution, crime, politics and, most recently, Putin’s invasion. There’s no evidence he’s a paid asset of the Russian state, but RT, the state-owned broadcaster, has employed him in the past and in 2015 he was awarded a medal by the Border Service, a branch of the FSB. The former cabinet minister Damian Green has described him as the modern equivalent of Lord Haw-Haw.

Perhaps the most serious allegation against Phillips is that he may have breached international law by interviewing prisoners of war. In April, he broadcast an interview with Aiden Aslin, a British-Ukrainian soldier captured by Russia who has since been sentenced to death. According to the barrister Geoffrey Robertson, this may have been unlawful because the coercive interrogation of prisoners of war for propaganda purposes is contrary to the Geneva Conventions, although Phillips disputes the ‘coercive’ part, claiming he interviewed Aslin at Aslin’s request. He has form in this area. In 2016 he uploaded an interview he’d done with a Ukrainian prisoner of war just before a prisoner exchange – although ‘interview’ may not be the right word. The prisoner had lost both arms and his sight in a mine blast and Phillips can be heard ridiculing him for blowing himself up.

So, not the sort of ‘journalist’ most free-speech champions are inclined to defend – and, indeed, I don’t know of a single advocacy group that has defended his rights (although Peter Hitchens has). But there is an important civil liberties issue here, because the decision to sanction him – the first British citizen to be sanctioned over Ukraine by our government – was taken without apparent due process.

And being sanctioned is a big deal. Phillips’s bank accounts have been frozen, so he is unable to pay the bills on his mortgaged property in England. No well-wishers can pay the bills on his behalf because it’s illegal to provide someone on the sanctions list with financial assistance. The majority of his income comes from donations via platforms like Patreon, but he’s had to close them down. He has been officially declared a persona non grata, yet without having been found guilty in a court of law.

According to the Foreign Office, the reason for sanctioning Phillips isn’t because he’s guilty of a crime, but because he ‘has produced and published media content that supports and promotes actions and policies which destabilise Ukraine and undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty, or independence of Ukraine’. That may be true, but why is that a reason to punish him without trial? If Britain was at war with Russia, that would be one thing – some civil liberties need to be suspended during wartime. But we are not.

The problem with this rationale is that it could easily be applied to another video-blogger who is a thorn in the side of one of our allies – Saudi Arabia, for instance – making it a sinister precedent. Indeed, had Corbyn won the last general election and frozen the assets of a dubious journalist taking sides against a communist country he had declared an ally, such as Cuba, we’d be justifiably outraged.

I think those of us who care about free speech need to hold our noses and condemn this decision. If the government thinks Phillips is guilty of a crime, then it should issue an international arrest warrant and bring him to justice. But until he has been convicted in court, he should not be penalised by the state. To punish him without due process is a breach of one of the most sacrosanct principles of English common law, as set out in Magna Carta. If we don’t challenge this decision, unappealing though Phillips may be, any one of us could be next.