Court of Appeal reduces sentence in Mohammad Alazawi v R circumcision fraud case

The Court of Appeal Criminal Division has upheld convictions against a man who performed non-therapeutic circumcisions while falsely claiming to be a doctor, while substantially reducing his sentence from nine years to six, in a judgement that examines for the first time how courts should assess the legality of religious circumcisions carried out by unqualified practitioners.

In Mohammad Alazawi v R [2026] EWCA Crim 947, Lady Justice May, Mr Justice Saini and His Honour Judge Picton considered an appeal against conviction and sentence following a nine week trial at Southwark Crown Court, at which the appellant was convicted of six counts of fraud, seven counts of wounding with intent contrary to section 18 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, and one count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, alongside earlier guilty pleas to offences under the Human Medicines Regulations 2012. The prosecution's case rested on two alternative bases of liability: that the appellant's false claims to be a surgeon had vitiated parental consent, and separately, that the manner in which he performed the procedures was so unsafe as to fall outside any lawful exception to the general prohibition on inflicting bodily harm, regardless of consent.

The court reviewed the established authorities on consent and assault, including R v Brown and R v BM, noting that ritual circumcision has long been recognised as a lawful exception to the general rule against consensual infliction of harm, but that, unlike activities such as boxing or surgery, it is not governed by any professional or regulatory standard against which conduct can readily be measured. The appellant argued that, in the absence of statutory regulation of non-medical circumcision, his convictions on this second basis could not stand, and that the trial judge had wrongly permitted the jury to assess his conduct by reference to expert evidence from a surgeon and an anaesthetist describing hospital-based standards inapplicable to a domestic religious procedure.

The court agreed that the trial judge's direction to the jury, which asked simply whether the circumcision had been conducted in an unsafe manner exposing the child to significant and unnecessary risk, lacked a clear benchmark and risked the jury holding the appellant to an inappropriate medical standard. It held that the correct question was whether the procedure departed so far from what a competent and careful non-medical circumciser would have done as to expose the child to significant and unnecessary risk. However, the court found that the appellant's unauthorised administration of local anaesthetic, an act no properly cautious non-medical circumciser would undertake, was on its own sufficient to satisfy that revised test, meaning the convictions remained safe notwithstanding the flawed direction.

On sentence, the court found that structuring the sentences for the wounding, fraud and medicines offences consecutively had produced an element of impermissible double counting, given the substantial factual overlap between the deception practised on parents and the unsafe conduct of the procedures themselves. It was also concerned that the sentencing judge appeared to have been influenced by the total number of procedures the appellant was known to have carried out, running into the hundreds, rather than confining his assessment to the offences actually before the court. The court quashed the four year sentences imposed for the wounding offences and substituted sentences of six years, to run concurrently with all other sentences, producing a total term of six years in place of the original nine.