'Coconut' placard trial met with protests outside court

Dozens of people protested outside of a court in London as the trial of a British Asian woman charged with a hate crime over a satirical placard begins.

- NADINE WHITE

Marieha Hussain, 37, was seen carrying a sign depicting the then prime minister Rishi Sunak and former home secretary Suella Braverman as coconuts at a pro-Palestine demonstration last November and was charged with a racially aggravated public order offence.

Campaigners say that her protest is a legitimate means of criticising right-wing politicians. Expressions like “coconut” and “c**n” have been used as insults within Black and Asian communities to describe other people from minoritised communities who are perceived as being sympathetic with racist agendas – implying that the person is brown on the outside but Eurocentric on the inside.

Outside Westminister Magistrates’ Court yesterday morning, protesters raised concerns about freedom of speech being under attack, as three Metropolitan Police officers looked on.

Dr Asim Qureshi, the Research Director at Cage, the advocacy group, told The Independent: “This case is ridiculous. In 24 years of doing this work, I have never seen a case as ridiculous as this one. We have to understand freedom of speech in the UK is being extremely racialised and there are limits to what you can say, as a person of colour, before the law is instrumentalised against you,”.

He compared Ms Hussain’s placard to a 2002 column by former prime minister Boris Johnson, who used the racist term “piccaninnies” to describe Black people, as well as the term “watermelon smiles”. Mr Johnson later defended the column as satire. “So, we know that from the most senior positions of government down to the everyday street racism, that there is, for us as people of colour, a two-tiered system of the way in which freedom of expression is permitted.”