Tommy Robinson told to pay £50,000 in costs after being jailed for contempt

Tommy Robinson has been ordered to pay £50,000 in costs after he was jailed for contempt of court, with the final amount still to be decided.

The political activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October after the Solicitor General took legal action against him for breaching a High Court injunction made in 2021.

Robinson admitted 10 breaches of the order, which barred him from repeating libellous allegations against a Syrian refugee.

Court order

In a court order issued on Tuesday, Mr Justice Johnson said that the Solicitor General had claimed a total of £80,350.52 in legal costs, which “does not appear to be disproportionate having regard to the nature of the issues in the case and the conduct of the defendant”.

He ruled that Robinson should pay £50,000 by 4pm on January 7 next year, with the remainder of the sum to be paid to be decided at a later date.

He said: “I do not consider that the applicant’s incarceration, or his claimed impecuniosity, is a good reason not to order a payment on account.

“Those factors might make enforcement of the order more difficult if the applicant does not voluntarily pay, but they do not amount to reasons of principle why the order should not be made.”

Libel

In 2021, Robinson was sued for libel by Jamal Hijazi after the then-schoolboy was assaulted at Almondbury Community School in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in October 2018.

After a clip of the incident went viral, Robinson made false claims on Facebook, including about Mr Hijazi attacking girls in his school, leading to the libel case.

Robinson was ordered to pay Mr Hijazi £100,000 in damages and his legal costs, as well as making the injunction preventing Robinson from repeating the allegations he made against the then-teenager.

The Solicitor General later issued two contempt claims against Robinson, claiming he “knowingly” breached the order, including by repeating the allegations in a film called Silenced.

‘Flagrant breach’

At a hearing at Woolwich Crown Court on October 28, lawyers claimed that Robinson had been “thumbing his nose at the court” and “undermining” the rule of law, including by showing Silenced at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in central London earlier this year.

Sentencing him, Mr Justice Johnson said that Robinson had “not shown any remorse” for his actions, which were “a planned, deliberate, direct, flagrant breach of the court’s orders”.

He said: “Nobody is above the law. Nobody can pick and choose which injunctions they obey and those they do not.”