Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) has lost the preliminary stage of a libel case to do with two videos in which he said a 16-yr-old Syrian boy was part of a gang which had beaten a young girl black and blue, and said the boy had also threatened to stab another child.

In a judgment made in the High Court today Mr Justice Nicklin rejected Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s argument that all that his two videos had implied was that as part of a gang the Syrian boy, Jamal Hijazi, had “committed serious acts of violence against a schoolgirl.”

Mr Justice Nicklin said this interpretation “fails to capture the gravity of the allegation..that she had been beaten ‘black and blue’……and ignores, completely, the allegation of a threat to stab the boy that is made clearly in the First Video.“

However the judge also rejected the claims by Jamal Hijazi’s lawyers that the “Tommy Robinson” videos had implied that the schoolboy was a “generally violent individual” and that there had been incidents of violence beyond those mentioned in the videos.

The libel action arose after a video of Jamal Hijazi being pushed to the ground and threatened with drowning at Almondbury School in Huddersfield were widely circulated first on social media and then in the media in November 2018.

In response to that video “Tommy Robinson” posted two videos on Facebook in which he said, among other things “this boy, Jamal, and I’ve heard from the child in question, he threatened to stab him…..This Jamal isn’t innocent. He beat a girl black and blue.“

Jamal Hijazi is suing Tommy Robinson for libel. This was just a preliminary ruling about the meaning of the videos and a full hearing in the case will take place at a later date.