Judicial sour grapes?

Last September, Aamer Anwar, a Scottish solicitor, made a fiery public statement on the steps of the High Court in Glasgow. His client, Mohammed Atif Siddique, had just been convicted of terrorism offences. Mr Anwar believed his client was innocent and that the court had been unduly influenced by the publicity surrounding the attack on Glasgow Airport. For expressing these views in public, Mr Anwar was charged with contempt of court – the first such case of its kind in the UK.

Mr Anwar has long been a thorn in the side of the Scottish legal establishment and often his utterances are in the extreme. But that is no cause to try and gag him. It is a fundamental principle of both democracy and justice that court hearings whic...