BAFTA can retroactively strip awards from winners convicted of serious crimes starting in 2025
In the fallout from the Huw Edwards scandal, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts has passed a new rule allowing the awards body to retroactively strip competitive awards from future winners convicted of serious crimes following a review process. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new rules go into effect for awards starting in 2025.
“Earlier this year, we were shocked by the news of the former BBC newsreader Huw Edwards’ arrest and subsequent conviction for child pornography offenses,” BAFTA chair Sara Putt wrote in a letter to BAFTA members announcing the change, via THR. “He won seven individual BAFTA Cymru awards for television presenting between 2002 and 2017. Following the news, deeply complex questions were raised regarding historic awards won by individuals and specifically, whether awards won in competition should ever be removed retrospectively.”
Putt writes that “there are exceptional grounds in which an award won in competition should be reviewed and possibly rescinded, and that we need to provide more clarity to entrants on this in our annual awards rulebooks,” Putt explained. “Starting in 2025, a forfeiture process will be introduced to our awards rulebooks with specific guidance on what would lead us to consider revoking a competitive award. This will include entries rendered ineligible through proven dishonesty, and the very rare instance of a winner being convicted of a serious criminal offense resulting in a prison sentence.”
BAFTA thought “very carefully about whether we could try to apply this criteria retrospectively now,” Putt noted, but “agreed it would be impossible to do this properly. So we will look forward and apply this criteria to all competitive awards presented from 2025 onwards.” There were calls to strip Edwards of his awards from the time he was accused to when he was convicted, but BAFTA has opted to not hold him or anyone else to standards that were not on the books when the incidents happened.
Putt also noted that honorary awards, such as Fellowships, Special Awards and Outstanding Contribution awards, are gifted by the academy and not won in competition, and can therefore be revoked without the same formal review process.
“No solution is perfect and there may be instances where the outcomes of this review are tested in the future, so we will review these principles and processes along with our other awards rules every year,” Putt concluded.
As Putt noted in her letter, BAFTA is not the only awards organization that has dealt with this question. For example, the Television Academy and the Recording Academy have not revoked competitive Emmys and Grammys won by Bill Cosby, whose rape conviction was vacated on appeal, but he has been stripped of most honorary awards including the Kennedy Center Honor and the Mark Twain Prize, and was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.