The Muslim advocacy group Cage is no longer being funded by either the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust or the Roddick Foundation, the Charity Commission has said. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has spoken of coming under ‘intense regulatory pressure’ to ensure it stopped funding.

In early March, the Charity Commission announced that it had opened compliance cases into two charities that had been funding Cage, an advocacy group which had come under criticism for seemingly defending Mohammed Emwazi, the man many media outlets have identified as the Islamic State militant nicknamed ‘Jihadi John’.

In a statement released on Friday, the Commission confirmed it had been in conversation with both charities and had received confirmation from them that they had ceased their funding of Cage.

‘The Roddick Foundation provided all the assurances within 24 hours as requested, stating that it has not funded Cage since December 2012,’ read a statement on the Charity Commission’s website. ‘The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust did not provide all the assurances within 24 hours. It did confirm that it last made a grant payment to Cage in January 2014 and that no further payments would be made under the 2011 grant.’

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust released its own updated statement last Friday. In it, the Trust says: ‘As a Quaker trust, we reject all violence. We believe that to break cycles of violence, we need due legal process for all, including those suspected or accused of terrible crimes.’

The statement also explains that the Trust ‘has previously funded Cage to promote and protect human rights’. After ‘being put under intense regulatory pressure’, they had decided to ‘publicly confirm that we will not fund Cage either now or in the future’.

Click here to read the full report by Hugh Radojev, published by Civil Society Media on 9 March.