PressEthic

In class we discussed whether or not the 1st Amendment is a significant protection for American journalists, the way that leak prosecutions undermine a free press here -- as they sometimes do in Europe, by the way -- and how Britain's libel laws also have a chilling affect.

I've got one more threat to freedom of speech to add: hate speech laws, which have troubling implications for free speech and freedom of the press in Europe (and Canada.)

The laws, passed with racists and Holocaust deniers in mind, even then raised questions of government censorship of the Internet.

More recently British historian David Irving began a controversial 3 year prison term in Austria, punishment for a book he wrote.

Journalist Oriana Fallaci spent the last years of her life fighting to stay out of jail, as the New Yorker recounts in a typically excellent profile:

Fallaci has repeatedly fallen afoul of some of Europe’s strict laws against vilifying religions or inciting racial hatred. (In Europe, the prevailing impulse toward certain kinds of outré opinions is to ban their expression.) In 2002, a French group, Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, tried unsuccessfully to get “The Rage and the Pride” banned. The following year, Swiss officials, under pressure from Muslim groups in that country, asked that she be extradited for trial; the Italian Minister of Justice refused the request. And she currently faces trial in Italy, on charges that amount to blasphemy, of all things. Last year, Adel Smith, a convert to Islam who heads a group called the Muslim Union of Italy, and who had previously sued the government to have a crucifix removed from his sons’ classroom, persuaded a judge in Bergamo to allow him to charge Fallaci with defaming Islam. A Mussolini-era criminal code holds that “whoever offends the state’s religion, by defaming those who profess it, will be punished with up to two years of imprisonment.” Though the code was written to protect the Catholic Church, it has been successively amended in the past ten years, so that it encompasses any “religion acknowledged by the state.”

Newspaper editors outside the United States also faced prosecution or the threat of prosecution for reprinting the Danish drawn cartoons of Mohammed, though almost entirely outside of Europe.

I take it for granted that we all loathe hate speech. And the ubiquity of that sentiment is precisely why laws against it are spreading.

But slopes are nowhere as slippery as those surrounding speech bans -- the speech for which citizens and journalists are prosecuted always ends up beyond the scope of the legislation's original intent.

That is reason enough to be thankful for the 1st Amendment.