The growing trend for criminalising criticism of
religion is a declaration of war on freedom of
speech, says Miklos Haraszti
It should no longer be difficult to tackle illegitimate limits to free speech,
particularly since so many dictatorships have now made the transition to
democracy. The required standards are clear enough: actual instigations to
actual crimes must be seen as crimes, but otherwise offensive speech should
be handled by encouraging further dialogue – in the press, through media
ethics bodies or in civil courts.
What we see instead, despite some progress internationally in
decriminalising violations of honour and dignity [see pp159–163], is a
growing, punitive trend that is introducing new speech bans into national
criminal codes.
One of these a` la mode speech crimes is defamation of history –
committed in some countries by questioning a nation’s historical narrative
and in others by defending it. While Turkey prosecutes writers for using the
word genocide to describe the massacre of Armenians in 1915, Switzerland
has prosecuted a Turkish politician for calling the use of the term genocide
an ‘international lie’. Yet defamation of religions is proving to be an even
more insidious and restrictive pattern worldwide.
On 26 March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution
condemning ‘defamation of religions’ as a human rights violation, despite
wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech. The
Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of
the Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favour and 11 against, with
13 abstentions. The resolution ‘Combating Defamation of Religions’ has
been passed, revised and passed again every year since 1999, except in
2006, in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and its predecessor, the
UN Human Rights Commission. It is promoted by the persistent sponsorship
of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference with the acknowledged
objective of getting it codified as a crime in as many countries as possible, or
at least promoting it into a universal anathema. Alongside this campaign,
there is a global undercurrent of violence and ready-made self-censorship
that has surrounded all secular and artistic depictions of Islamic subjects
since the Rushdie fatwa.
It is a post-modern, Orwellian spin crusade against human dignity.
This year’s resolution, unlike previous versions, no longer ignores Article 19,
the right to free expression. That crucial human right has now received a
mention, albeit in a context which misleadingly equates defamation of
religions with incitement to hatred and violence against religious people,
and on that basis denies it the protection of free speech. It also attempts to
bracket criticism of religion with racism.
communist governments among them, along with the post-colonial or
predominantly Muslim nations. Yet only very few of the 23, amongst them
South Africa and Indonesia, are democracies equipped with a truly
pluralistic media. The consistently high number of abstentions, including
by nations with free speech guarantees, helps ensure the proposition is
officially accepted every year.
Because of this contemporary strategy, I reject the often heard claim
that the resolution’s backers represent a culturally defined movement. That
claim would only serve to offer another excuse to patronise the endeavour,
and leniently underestimate its impact. In fact, the drive to criminalise
defamation of religions is an entirely post-modern, Orwellian spin crusade
against human dignity, ostensibly in its name.
Year after year, the Human Rights Council (HRC) vote lends a double
domestic victory to the supporting oppressive governments. It cements their
control of speech through cultural taboos and blasphemy laws, and at
the same time glorifies and internationally acknowledges them in the
vanguard of promoting tolerance.
Of course, one can understand why many democracies condescendingly
abstain from the fight and let the game of the Organisation of the
Islamic Conference prevail. After all, since the Iranian Revolution and the
global debut of al Qaeda, those willing to present the oppressive notion of
defamation of religions in human rights terms are by definition moderates,
compared to the jihadists who openly reject those rights. The HRC
manoeuvres also help the moderates to counter claims by domestic radicals
that their governments are not true guardians of the faith.
I happen to remember these games from my time in the closed
civilisation of the communist one-party state, where pluralism consisted of
factional fights inside the Politburo of the Party. Kremlinologists also knew
the game, but they must have had more fun watching it than I had. The
technique was called ‘overtaking from the left’, and it meant the recurring
scene whereby otherwise pragmatic leaders of the Party started to emanate
hardliner slogans, obviously in order to keep the Stalinists at bay. It actually
never simply meant just tough talk; it always came with new measures
against freethinkers, such as house searches and indictments, ‘only’ to
provide proofs of the leadership’s fidelity to the cause. This tactic is a distant
relative of the ‘taking the wind out of the sails’ policy of western moderate
parties, when they buy into anti-immigration measures in order to preclude a
growing popularity of xenophobic platforms that propose . . . anti-immigration
measures.
The trouble is that ‘taking the wind out of the sails’ may help one stay on
board, but never succeeds in easing the restrictions. Let me tell you how it
really works when the stipulations of the Human Rights Council resolution
are applied.
In Azerbaijan, one of the supporters of the resolution, two journalists
were given prison sentences in 2007. Rafiq Tagi, a journalist of the
intellectual monthly Senet, and Samir Sadagatoglu, the newspaper’s
editor, were sentenced to three and four years respectively, for alleged
‘incitement to religious hatred’ in a philosophical essay published in 2006.
In fact, the essay compared European and Islamic values in a somewhat
self-critical vein. (The language was ‘them and us’.) Its thesis was innocent,
well-meaning and polite. It was a similar message about a similar subject,
‘reason and faith’, to Pope Benedict XVI’s famous Regensburg speech the
same year. In my assessment, it was even milder, as there were no Byzantine
quotations ascribing violent proselytism to Mohammed. The question of
violence did not even turn up in the text.
Previously, an Iranian grand ayatollah, Fazel Lankarani, had issued a
fatwa calling for the two journalists to be killed. Domestic religious activists
responded by starting an intimidation campaign against the journalists.
Reportedly, they were allowed to shout death threats in the courtroom. The
journalists’ crime was defamation of religion (their own, apparently) and
incitement, by the same act, to religious hatred (against themselves, one
must conclude). Yet it was the journalists who sat in the dock, not those
who menaced them with violence.
And, most importantly, the Iranian ayatollah who called for their death
was never accused of incitement, neither in Azerbaijan nor in Iran –
protected as he was by his status as a defender, rather than a defamer,
of the faith.
Similar abuses could be cited from several non-Muslim countries as
well, all of them, by the way, participating states of the OSCE, and some of
them members of the Council of Europe. The commitments of the former
and the standards of the latter would forbid any persecution based on
‘defamation of religions’. But under the justifying umbrella of the HRC
resolutions (and exploiting the lack of resolute opposition to them in Europe)
the crisis created around the Danish cartoons was used to get tough on
critically minded outlets and journalists.
In Russia, the Vologda newspaper Nash Region published a collage of
the cartoons on 15 February 2006, as part of an article on the global
controversy. The proprietor decided to close the newspaper shortly
afterwards in order to ease the legal consequences. Prosecutors had
immediately opened a case against the editor, Anna Smirnova, for ‘inciting
religious hatred’. In April 2006, she was fined 100,000 roubles (approximately
US$3,000) and given a two-year suspended sentence. Happily, a
month later, the Vologda Oblast Court overturned the decision on appeal.
It was clear no happy ending would have been possible had the paper still
existed.
Exactly the same scenario was played out in Volgograd: the publisher
of Gorodskie Vesti decided to close the newspaper after charges for
defamation and incitement were brought by the regional branch of the
country’s ruling party, United Russia. Criminal proceedings were subsequently
dropped. The trigger for the prosecution was a sweet, truly
peace-preaching caricature of the four venerated personalities Moses,
Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha. In the cartoon, the religious leaders are watching television and concerned to see demonstrators from different
religions hurling insults at each other. ‘This is not what we have taught
you to do,’ one of the prophets is saying.
In Belarus, Alexander Zdvizhkov, editor of the Zhoda opposition
newspaper, was sentenced to three years in prison on 18 January 2008 for
incitement of religious hatred. His newspaper was shut down in March 2006
for merely planning to publish the cartoons, and remains closed today.
Zdvizhkov went into hiding abroad, was then arrested upon return, and
finally released after the Supreme Court reduced his sentence from three
years to three months, the term he had already served.
I do not see any moral difference between ordering the killing of reporters and issuing fatwas against writers
But these were only opportunistic blitzes. Since the cartoons crisis, another
new punitive fashion has emerged, also inspired by the HRC resolutions: the
extremism package. In Russia (which came up with the idea), Belarus,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Tajikistan, legislators have bundled
the defamation of religions provisions with otherwise legitimate incitement
laws, adding also the ban of ‘offensive criticism’ (yes, defamation) of
government bodies or officials. This cocktail of legislation is presented as a
heightened form of combating a never precisely defined attitude –
extremism. There is an echo here of the West’s promotion of terrorism
provisions, which is helpful in defusing possible criticism. But while western
legislation was criticised domestically as being possibly conducive to
illegitimate prosecution of political thought, the eastern extremism packages
are actually created for that purpose. And they are used, too, especially in
retaliation for unwanted coverage of the human rights situation in the
Northern Caucasus.
At the time of writing, Slovakia is planning to introduce its own
‘extremism’ package, ostensibly to fight radicalism. Ireland – while
otherwise decriminalising libel – is about to introduce a new crime, ‘blasphemous libel’, described as an act of compliance with a constitutional
tenet dating from the 1930s. Is it far-fetched to see here an implicit, perhaps
even unconscious, influence of the HRC campaign? When I referred earlier to
the surrounding threat of violence, I meant the disturbing, but untold,
connection between the recurring legal drive at the UN Human Rights
Council and the fatwas, murders and violent demonstrations against secular
or critical depictions of Islamic issues. The grievances expressed by the
fatwa authors and the HRC diplomats are in fact indistinguishable. What is
missing here is the realisation that combating defamation of religions is not
just harmful: it is the wrong fight, the wrong criminalisation.
I do not see any moral difference between ordering a contracted killing
of investigative reporters like Anna Politkovskaya and issuing fatwas that
call for murdering writers or journalists. Both punish writers for doing their
job. And, by the way, the fatwas also offer financial rewards, just like the
zakazchiki in Russia.
In Pakistan, the main country sponsor of this year’s HRC resolution,
Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, prayer leader at the historic Mohabat Khan
mosque in Peshawar, announced in 2006 that the mosque and his
religious school would give US$25,000 and a car, while a local jewellers
association offered another US$1m, for the murder of any Danish
cartoonist. In India, Uttar Pradesh Minister for Haj and Minority Welfare
Haji Yaqoob Qureishi placed a 510m Indian rupee (US$11m) bounty on
the head of a cartoonist, plus the murderer’s weight in gold. I am listing
here examples only from inside democracies that signed the HRC
resolutions or abstained.
At this point, the resolution is no longer an exercise at taking the
wind out of the sails of the radicals. It is turning out to be a cover-up
for the murderous instigators of religious tension and reactionary
self-censorship.
I find it a scandal that authors of edicts calling for the murder of
writers or journalists can still continue to be respected and do not have to
face the consequences of their hateful acts, while many journalists have
to live anonymously under police protection. So far, none of the names of
the instigators of these fatwas has appeared on wanted lists, not even in
the countries which, I am sure, would extradite the masterminds of
Politkovskaya’s murder, if found. That is the HRC resolution’s longest
shadow.
Caution is somewhat understandable in a country such as
tiny Denmark, stricken by calls for a commercial boycott, or in any single nation. But what about the European Union? Has it not been designed
to be stronger than its components? What about Interpol and other
international law enforcement agencies? Since when have they dropped
soliciting murder from their list of crimes? What about at least a travel ban
against the well-known zakazchiki of religious hate crimes?
The Human Rights Council must be told: if incitement to religious
hatred is what you are concerned about, call immediately for the punishment
of those who issue fatwas inciting violence. There can be no stronger
protection against defamation of Islam or any faith. Promote tolerance by
relieving the fear factor from the minds of the world’s editors.
On the other hand, the vague parameters of possible defamation cases
have now grown to include the ‘targeting’ of symbols and venerated leaders
of religion by the media and the Internet. What we are witnessing may be an
effort at diplomacy, but it is also a declaration of war on twenty-first century
media freedoms by a coalition of latter-day authoritarians.
There is nothing backward looking or historicising in the declaration.
It adopts the language of human rights so that the proposal sounds
compatible with the advanced multiculturalism of liberal democracies.
All the signatories have acquiesced: the late-communist and the post-
by Miklos Haraszti
Source: Index On Censorship
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment