THE GIRLS WERE RAPED. THE TRIALS WERE GAGGED. THE STATE KEPT ITS SECRETS.
THE CROWN IS USING THE CONTEMPT OF COURT ACT TO HIDE THE RAPE GANG TRIALS AND CONTROL WHAT THE PUBLIC IS TOLD
In the spring of 2018 twenty men from Huddersfield were on trial at Leeds Crown Court for raping and abusing fifteen girls between 2004 and 2011. The men were British Asian, mainly of Pakistani heritage. The girls were white, aged eleven to seventeen, some in care, some with learning difficulties, one with the mental age of a seven-year-old. They had been drugged and passed from man to man, sometimes to drug dealers in payment for the drugs used on them. They told the juries they had believed the men were showing them affection.
The courtroom was open to the public and the press bench was full. The reporters on it heard the prosecution open its case and heard the girls give evidence, and since 19 March 2018 a judge had forbidden them from printing any of it until the last of three linked trials had ended.
On 25 May 2018 Tommy Robinson stood outside that building with a phone and broadcast for an hour and a half about the trial inside. The order meant nobody else was reporting it. He said the media were refusing to cover these men and that he was only repeating what had been printed when they were first charged.
Within hours he was in front of Judge Marson and sentenced to thirteen months. The judge then ordered that his jailing could not be reported either. The Court of Appeal quashed that in August 2018 after he had served ten weeks, so the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, brought fresh proceedings. In July 2019 the High Court jailed him for nine months.
What he had read out on the pavement was the nine defendants' names and charges, from a Huddersfield Examiner report that had been online for a year, and the court held that was the breach, because a postponement order covers reports of a trial whether or not the public already knows the facts.
The court also found that the order was on none of the court's lists, screens or doors and not on the official listing website two months after it was made, and that Robinson had asked a security officer that morning whether the ban had been lifted and been told the officer did not know.
Rebecca Marano
Robinson revealed nothing. He read out nine names and the charges against them from a year-old newspaper report, and the law made that a crime because a judge had ordered that the trial not be reported, whether or not the facts were already public.
For that the state prosecuted him twice. In the seven years those fifteen white girls were being raped by twenty men of mainly Pakistani heritage, West Yorkshire Police was not made to answer in public for what it knew and what it did, and the court heard that many of the men the girls were passed to have never been identified, let alone charged.
THE SAME OFFICE HAS BEEN GAGGING THE TRUTH ABOUT CHILDREN SINCE 1972
In the late 1950s pregnant women were given a drug called thalidomide for morning sickness. Thousands of babies were born without arms or legs because of it. In 1972 Harold Evans and the Sunday Times set out to expose who was responsible. The Attorney General went to court and had the article banned. Evans took Britain to the European Court of Human Rights and won in 1979.
TIME
Parliament's answer was the Contempt of Court Act 1981, sold as the law that would protect the right to report what happens in court. In its fourth section it gave judges a power to stop that reporting.
Section 4(2) lets a judge postpone reporting of a trial held in open court where he finds a substantial risk of prejudice to it or to a connected one. The trial goes on in open court with reporters present, and they are forbidden to print what they hear until a date the judge sets.
On 10 February 1981 Lord Gifford, a barrister, stood in the House of Lords and moved to strip the power out of the Bill. He told the House how it would be used.
- The judge would be acting on information put forward by a party who wants the postponement, information which it will have no possibility of verifying.
- The press would have no right to object in court and no appeal.
- In a serious case arousing much public interest, the opening of the prosecution and the evidence given would be suppressed because of a risk to a later trial.
He said: "an order to postpone reporting is likely in many cases to be in effect an order which suppresses reporting, because in the event the case may never be reported at all, or reported too late for anybody to assess its implications."
Lord Elwyn-JonesThe Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, answered that the power had existed since 1821 and had never given rise to any kind of complaint, that the parties to the case could argue for or against it, and that without it Britain would be back in Strasbourg losing to the Sunday Times the other way round.
Hailsham’s reassurance was that the two sides in the case could argue over the order. The problem was that in a rape gang trial both sides want it. The accused wants his name kept out of the papers, and the Crown wants the evidence about the police and the council kept out too. The reporters who would argue against it were not in the room and had no right under the Act to be heard. That is the arrangement Parliament voted through, and I believe it is why the Crown keeps asking.
Hailsham's government had lost in Strasbourg two years earlier for gagging a newspaper. The Attorney General had gagged Evans, and the Lord Chancellor's Bill then wrote a power to gag into the law that was meant to stop it, over a warning recorded in Hansard.
The Crown Prosecution Service answers to the Attorney General, and it has applied for those orders on the trials of men who raped children ever since.
TWENTY MEN CONVICTED. THE POLICE CONTROLLED THE HEADLINES.
The Recorder of Leeds, Judge Guy Kearl QC, lifted the ban on 19 October 2018 after the Press Association and others applied. Twenty convictions and 221 years of sentences were published in one afternoon, with West Yorkshire Police's statement and the CPS's statement attached. Judge
Marson had told Dhaliwal, a married father of two, that he had treated the girls as commodities to be passed around, and that children's lives had been ruined and families had watched their daughters go out of control over months and years.
Seven months of sworn evidence from fifteen girls about what the police and the council had done while that was happening was up to seven months old by the time anyone could print it, and the coverage that day was the convictions and the force's statement.
The Newsroom
The Yorkshire Post spent that day attacking the one man who had broken the silence, with an editorial saying Tommy Robinson owed the Huddersfield victims an apology. West Yorkshire Police published the twenty mugshots and thanked the victims for their bravery, and nobody asked the force why fifteen white children were in the hands of those men for seven years, or who the other men were that the girls had been sold to, the ones the court was told have never been identified. The men's trial was fair with or without that order. The police got a day without questions because of it.
The Newsroom
THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO EVER BROKE A GAG WERE THE ONES THE CROWN CAME AFTER
In July 2019 Adele Forrest, deputy news editor of the Rotherham Advertiser, walked into Sheffield Crown Court to cover the trial of four men charged with the sexual abuse of children in her town. Before the trial opened, the judge had already made reporting restrictions on naming two of the defendants. He had made them in chambers and in private. Neither Forrest nor the other reporter covering the case had been told they were being made or given any chance to object, which the Criminal Procedure Rules require.
She stood up on the first day and told Judge Slater that he could not impose a restriction without both sides being able to make representations, and that the reasons for any restriction had to be convincingly established.
The judge looked again at what he had been told. He said the information he had been given about those two men was inaccurate, and he lifted the restrictions.
James Walker
Forrest said afterwards that if she had not been in court for those first two days, the trial would have opened under two orders made on wrong information, and nobody outside that room would have known.
That is the courtroom Gifford described in 1981, a judge acting on information from the party who wants the silence, with no way to check it and nobody there for the public.
Put Forrest next to Robinson. Forrest knew the Criminal Procedure Rules and had a seat on the press bench, and the order fell in an afternoon. Robinson had a phone and knew there was an order, and went to prison twice for it. His barrister told the High Court there was no central register of these orders and no easy way for anyone outside the system to check. The court answered that breaches by newspapers are extremely rare because professional journalists are well-informed and well-advised.
In Sheffield the orders were lifted because a reporter who knew the rules stood up in court. That is how a gag is lifted lawfully, by someone with a right to be in the room who knows how to use it. At the time, local papers were reluctant sending anyone to court to cover little White girls being gang raped. What is left is a man on the pavement with a phone, who has no right to be heard, who goes to prison when he tries.
Sarah Marshall
Rotherham is still doing it. Amar Ilyas was convicted of twenty sexual offences at Sheffield Crown Court in September 2025. That fact was banned from print until his brothers’ trial finished on 9 March 2026.
Nobody can say how many other rape gang trials are sealed in 2026, because the Judicial College gives judges a template order for these cases, and one of its optional clauses bans reporting that the order itself exists.
WEST YORKSHIRE POLICE HAD HER ON ITS MISSING LIST FOR FOUR YEARS AND THE COURTS SEALED HER TRIALS FOR THREE MORE
In Bradford a girl was fourteen in 2007 when fifteen men, Yousaf Bhatti, Anwar Aziz, Faisal Rashid and Omar Taj among them, began raping her, and eighteen when it stopped in 2011. Through those four years West Yorkshire Police's own records show she was reported missing again and again, and each time she was found, brought back and recorded. It was 2015 before officers came to her door, because her name had come up on the missing lists as a possible rape gang victim, and February 2016 before an investigation was opened.
I believe a force that records the same child missing over and over for four years knew what was happening to her and did nothing beyond recording it.
The men were tried and sentenced across five hearings at Bradford Crown Court between November 2023 and May 2026, a combined 188 years. Every one of those hearings was under reporting restrictions. For two and a half years she could not say in public that any of them had been convicted. On 3 June 2026 the judge lifted the orders and the force put out its press release. She said her childhood had been taken away and that it had consumed her life for nearly twenty years.
THE CROWN PROSECUTION SERVICE IS THE ONE ASKING JUDGES TO SEAL THESE TRIALS
At Bristol Crown Court six men went on trial for abusing vulnerable teenage girls. Before a witness was called the CPS applied to have every word of its own case hidden until the last verdict was in. Judge Macmillan granted it in full. It took the Guardian and other media organisations to go back and fight it.
She relaxed the order so the fact of the trial and the nature of the charges could be printed, said there was a particular public interest in serious sexual offending by "grooming gangs", and kept the ban on the evidence, forty-five years after Gifford told the Lords that was what the power would do.
The police investigate and the CPS prosecutes. In that room they are one side, the Crown. When the girl from Bradford describes in the witness box the four years the force had her on its missing list, that evidence is against the police, and the party applying to postpone it is the police's partner in the case. The CPS's own guidance tells prosecutors to be alert to Section 4(2) wherever further trials are likely, particularly where media interest can be anticipated. I believe the CPS applies for these orders knowing whose evidence they will hold back.
WHEN THE BANS LIFTED, WEST YORKSHIRE POLICE WROTE THE STORY AND THE EVIDENCE WAS MONTHS OLD
The Leeds ban came off on 19 October 2018 and the Bradford ban on 3 June 2026. On both days the coverage was the convictions and West Yorkshire Police's statement. The evidence the juries heard was seven months old in Leeds and up to two and a half years old in Bradford by the time it was lawful to print.
The force that had the Bradford girl on its own missing list while she was being raped supplied the story of the day.
Gifford told the Lords in 1981 that this is how a postponement order works. The evidence is heard in full, and the public learns of it when the court says, which in Leeds and Bradford was after the story was over.
In Bristol the ban is on now, and the Judicial College's model order means nobody can say how many other rape gang trials are sealed with it, while the national inquiry prepares to sit in December 2026 to ask what the police did when these children went missing.
The Attorney General is in charge of the prosecutors who ask for these orders and can tell them to stop asking for any order that covers evidence about a police force or a council. The Attorney General can also publish every order in force on a child abuse trial and who applied for it. Reform, Restore and the Conservatives have the votes to make the Attorney General do that before the inquiry sits. None of them has asked.
Fifteen women in Leeds and one woman in Bradford went into open court and told a jury under oath what was done to them. The woman in Bradford said on 3 June 2026 that it had consumed her life for nearly twenty years. For four of those years West Yorkshire Police had her on its missing list, and for the last three of them a court had her evidence under a reporting ban.
Are you starting to see just how many layers there are to this cover up?
Parliament was warned in 1981 and passed the power anyway, so Parliament has to take it back. The Contempt of Court Act has to be amended so that no postponement order can cover evidence about what a police force, a council or any other public body did. Every order has to go on a public register, with the court, the case, who applied for it and when it ends, and the clause that lets an order hide its own existence has to go.
Until that is law, the Attorney General can direct the Crown Prosecution Service to stop applying for orders over evidence about public bodies and can publish every order now in force.
Reform, Restore and the Conservatives have the numbers to table that amendment and force that direction. They campaign on these children at every election, I'll leave it to you to decide whether they will or not.
The National Inquiry is entering the phase that will decide not just where it goes, but what it is prepared to confront once it gets there.
That is why the pressure cannot stop at getting places named.
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We forced Oldham onto the list. We showed the way in Bradford. We campaigned relentlessly in Birmingham and across Wales, and both were named.
None of it was handed to us.
And now the next fight begins. Making sure the Inquiry actually asks the questions politicians and institutions spent decades avoiding.
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You know what we are up against. The mainstream media will not touch my work. Institutions I investigate do not volunteer their records. Politicians do not suddenly decide to hold themselves to account.
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But getting the inquiry was never the end of this campaign. In many ways it was only the beginning. Now we have to watch where it goes, what it investigates, which places it avoids, which witnesses it calls, which records it obtains and whether the same institutions that failed these children are allowed to control the story again.
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For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.
Children gang raped, communities betrayed, politicians and police officers involved protected, and you expected to shake your head and carry on as if nothing more can be done because lessons have been learned.
For eight years, I have refused. The police repeatedly dawn raided my home and falsified evidence to try and silence me. The newspapers smeared me. And Pakistani gangsters, under the protection of Labour politicians, followed me home. Islamists openly incited my murder.
Blacklisted by the mainstream media, only your support makes it possible for me to keep exposing the truth those in power want buried.
They sold children for votes and sacrificed entire towns and cities at their altar of multiculturalism. I help you make sense of it. And I help you fight back.
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Raja Miah MBE