THE former Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) chief prosecutor of the North West, Nazir Afzal has launched a campaign to call for misogyny to be made a hate crime.

It aims to ensure offences motivated by hatred against women would be treated on a par with crimes involving racism, religious intolerance and homophobia. Recently, celebrities, including Michael Sheen, Jason Manford and Gary Neville have joined forces with him. In an open letter, Afzal and others joined MP Stella Creasy to press the House of Lords to accept the Newlove amendment to the Policing Bill when it comes before them.

In the ongoing debate regarding Boris Johnson’s Savile slur, Afzal defended Labour leader Keir Starmer. “Sir Keir Starmer played a crucial role in ‘fixing’ the failings that led to the Jimmy Savile scandal and the prime minister’s slur is ‘despicable’,” he said.

Afzal, who brought down a Rochdale child abuse gang, has earlier suggested Boris Johnson could face prosecution for misconduct in public office over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Afzal’s older brother Umar died of coronavirus in April last year while isolating at home in Birmingham. Weeks later, his mother also passed away.

He said that his brother would not be dead if the government hadn’t stopped community testing. Later, Afzal also contracted the virus. This experience led him to call for the CPS, the Metropolitan Police and Durham Constabulary to reopen and fully investigate claims that the prime minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings may have broken laws during the lockdown.

In January 2021, he said that his family home in Manchester was attacked after he joined a campaign to prosecute Cummings for alleged lockdown breaches.

Son of Pashtun immigrants from northern Pakistan, Afzal was a former senior prosecutor for London and the chief prosecutor for northwest England until 2015.