A candidate for London mayor lost a High Court challenge over allegations that the BBC unlawfully demanded that his party political broadcast should be altered.
Alan Craig, the Christian Choice candidate, said the BBC had forced the changes in the run-up to this week’s local elections because he had raised concerns over plans for a Muslim ‘mega mosque”.
His counsel, Paul Diamond, protested to a senior judge that Craig’s freedom of expression, protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, had been violated.
In his broadcast, Craig had wanted to describe Tablighi Jamaat – which is behind plans to build Europe’s biggest mosque next to the 2012 Olympics site in east London – as a ‘separatist Islamic group”.
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But the BBC had ‘commanded’that the word ‘separatist’be replaced with ‘controversial”.
Rejecting Craig’s application for permission to seek a judicial review, Mr Justice Collins ruled that he had left it ‘far too late”, and should have launched the legal challenge earlier.
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