Toby Young Toby Young

In defence of a pro-Kremlin stooge

[Getty Images]

As a defender of free speech, I’m used to taking up the cudgels on behalf of unsavoury people. To quote Lord Justice Sedley in a famous High Court judgment in 1999, ‘Freedom of speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to provoke violence.’ But the case of Graham Phillips, who was sanctioned by the British government last month, is one of the hardest I’ve ever had to wrestle with.

Phillips styles himself an ‘independent journalist’, but it’s far from clear that the additional free-speech protections we apply to journalists should be extended to him. It would be more accurate to describe him as a pro-Russian propagandist. He’s a British citizen who’s been based in Ukraine, for the most part, since 2010, writing stories and making YouTube videos about football, prostitution, crime, politics and, most recently, Putin’s invasion. There’s no evidence he’s a paid asset of the Russian state, but RT, the state-owned broadcaster, has employed him in the past and in 2015 he was awarded a medal by the Border Service, a branch of the FSB. The former cabinet minister Damian Green has described him as the modern equivalent of Lord Haw-Haw.

Graham Phillips is not the sort of ‘journalist’ free-speech champions are inclined to defend

Perhaps the most serious allegation against Phillips is that he may have breached international law by interviewing prisoners of war. In April, he broadcast an interview with Aiden Aslin, a British-Ukrainian soldier captured by Russia who has since been sentenced to death. According to the barrister Geoffrey Robertson, this may have been unlawful because the coercive interrogation of prisoners of war for propaganda purposes is contrary to the Geneva Conventions, although Phillips disputes the ‘coercive’ part, claiming he interviewed Aslin at Aslin’s request.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in