TWO men found guilty of spearheading an internet race-hate campaign are facing jail after a landmark legal case on the limits of online free speech in the UK.
Simon Sheppard, from Selby, and York University graduate Stephen Whittle targeted Jews, Asians and other ethnic groups in a series of articles published on a website viewed by thousands of far-right supporters.
But they will not be sentenced for m
onths after they skipped bail and fled to the United States to claim political asylum, complaining of "a three-year campaign of legal harassment by the governing British Labour Party".
Details of the case, believed to be the first of its kind in the UK, can be revealed today after the second of two lengthy trials at Leeds Crown Court ended with guilty verdicts.
Sheppard's website, to which Whittle contributed, featured grotesque images of murdered Jews alongside cartoons and posters ridiculing ethnic groups.
Sheppard, who had been expelled from the British National Party, was even caught delivering racist pamphlets door to door in North Yorkshire.
Shepherd and Whittle are believed to be the first UK citizens to be convicted of publishing racist material online. They claimed they should be acquitted because the articles were posted on a server registered in the US beyond the reach of UK law.
Prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford said: "The defendants were a pair of racists who held what you may regard as fairly extreme views about people who were Jewish, black, Asian, Chinese, Indian and, in reality, anyone who wasn't white.
"People in this country are entitled to be racist and they are entitled to hold unpleasant points of view, but what they are not entitled to do is publish or distribute written material which is insulting, threatening or abusive and is intended to stir up racial hatred or is likely to do so.
"If this sort of material is made generally available on the internet or by pushing it through people's doors indiscriminately, it is likely that racial hatred will be stirred up in some people who are exposed to it – the young, the impressionable, the gullible, and so on."
Sheppard, 51, of Brook Street, Selby, was found guilty of 16 charges relating to the possession, publication and distribution of racially inflammatory material.
Whittle, 42, of Avenham Lane, Preston, Lancashire, was convicted of five counts of publishing racially inflammatory written material. The pair denied the charges, insisting the articles satirised political correctness.
The investigation into Sheppard began in 2004 when copies of a pamphlet, Tales of the Holohoax, were pushed through the letterbox of a Blackpool synagogue and sent to a prominent Jewish academic in London.
After the pamphlet was traced back to a post office box in Hull registered to Sheppard, police raided his flat, and discovered the racist website, which typically attracted 4,000 visitors a day.
Sheppard and Whittle fled the country in July last year and are now being held by US immigration authorities in California. Their asylum claim is to be heard in March.
Rotherham MP Denis MacShane said: "This is a landmark case in the campaign against hate incitement, whether on the web or in any other way that seeks to denigrate Jews, Muslims and other people on account of what they can't alter – the colour of their skin or the fact they were born Jewish."
He added: "This is a test case for the US on whether the American court will protect anti-semites and those that incite the hate that leads to anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim violence, or whether it respects a British court decision and sends these people back for sentence."
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