The CPS has just been ordered to pay CAA’s legal costs after falsely prosecuting Mark Birbeck for “assaulting emergency workers” when he held a sign saying “Hamas is Terrorist”. In September 2024, Mark, who is the founder of @OurFightUk, was accused of assaulting two emergency workers at a protest at which he had been holding the sign alongside Niyak Ghorbani. CAA stepped in and has provided Mark with free legal representation, as we have many times before (for Niyak too). Two days before Mark’s trial in October 2025, the CPS revealed that it had been sitting on video footage that exonerated Mark, and discontinued its prosecution. Last week, a Judge ruled that this was one of those “very rare” and “exceptional cases” where the prosecution had made such “clear and stark” errors that the CPS was ordered to pay defence costs related to their “improper” mistakes. The CPS instructed King’s Counsel to oppose the defence costs application, but the Judge found the CPS’s approach to disclosure to have been “shambolic”. In particular, the Judge castigated the CPS for failing to serve the crucial police videographer’s footage, which vindicated Mr Birbeck, until just before the trial. CAA is proud to have assisted Mark, a staunch ally of the Jewish community in the fight against antisemitism, by providing and paying for legal representation. Mark and Niyak have been repeatedly arrested and on occasion charged, only to have bail conditions lifted by courts and cases collapse, with our support. It is obscene that the police and prosecution are wasting time hounding people who are simply pointing out that Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, rather than focusing on the terror sympathisers in the regular hate marches that have transformed our cities and made antisemitic hate crime a daily feature of Jewish life in modern Britain. If it risks public disorder to point out that Hamas are terrorists, that’s because there are too many people on our streets who think they aren’t. That trend is the real menace.
