introduction
New Twists on Old Offenses: Hate Speech and Blasphemy
https://www.hrw.org/legacy/test/wr2k7/essays/shrinking/bak/index.htm
When one speaks of the danger to the norm against torture since 9/11, it is fairly obvious what that means. Torture, after all, draws up rather specific images of the individual under assault, despite the Bush administration’s attempts to muddy the issue. But the same is not true for freedom of expression, a norm that applies to an expansive range of human activity.
The right to free expression protects everyone from the man on the public soapbox to the anonymous blogger; from the woman who prefers hijab to the cross-dresser; from the persecuted defender of human rights to the repellant genocide denier. The erosion of the norm against torture is alarming precisely because the norm is absolute: under the law, there are no other interests to balance. But the right to free expression can be qualified in light of public safety, national security, public order, morality, and the rights of others. The communities concerned with these many aspects are often fragmented, and the precise contours of the right are more fluid. It is easy to lose track of the whole picture.
This is why some five years after 9/11 it is especially important to try to take stock of the scope of free expression. The view is not reassuring. Responses to terrorism combined with dynamics that long predate 9/11 have produced an array of threats to free expression.
From Iraq to Russia to the Philippines, journalists are being treated as partisans, even combatants, and are now more frequently targeted for attack than at any time in recent memory. Global migration (witness the tensions surrounding the integration of Muslim immigrants in Europe) and the steady growth of civil society in many formerly closed countries (witness conditions in Russia and China) are fueling governmental urges to restrict expression. Counterterrorism has given new vigor to some old forms of censorship, and created new ones. Crimes of “glorification” of terrorism, once rare, are proliferating, and hate speech is increasingly becoming the rationale for imposing criminal or administrative sanctions against those thought to be extremists. Despite (or because of) the continuing cyber-revolution, states are also moving quickly to fence and filter the internet, and new technologies are fueling an explosion of state surveillance, often justified in the name of counterterrorism.
Cataloguing the new rents in the fabric of the right to free expression is important in itself but then we need to step back to understand better how these affect the cloth as a whole. When communications are subjected to unwarranted surveillance, or when new speech-based crimes are created, the entire context for deciding whether an article can be published, a sermon preached, or a certain garment worn is changed. Moreover, the effect of new restrictions in states with long records of protecting free expression is global; restrictive precedents give fresh cover and encouragement to states with a history of trammeling this right. The effect of these developments is greater than the sum of discrete instances.
With this in mind, it is plain that mending the fabric will require more than just a patch here and there. This essay sketches some of the damage and suggests ways to respond. We must overcome the tendency to look at each restriction in isolation from others and only in local context. And we must be vigilant in responding to each assault on this freedom, systematically and repeatedly, if we are to protect all other rights.
Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and publisher, spoke to what is at stake:
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power.1
Journalists in the Crosshairs
The press has often been subject to attack, both physically and legally. But there is reason to believe that both contemporary armed conflicts and the so-called war on terror have rendered it more precarious than ever to be a journalist.
In Russia, it has become extremely dangerous to report on the conflict in Chechnya in any way. Most recently, the world was shocked by what seemed like the contract killing of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaia on October 7, 2006, potentially in retaliation for her searching and critical writing on Chechnya. Earlier in the year, the government had convicted the director of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society of “inciting racial hatred” through articles he published in the group’s journal, and then shut down the nongovernmental organization itself for good measure.
Though war correspondents enjoy immunity under the laws of armed conflict, they work in precarious circumstances and are vulnerable. Even so, the toll on journalists in Iraq by any measure has been extraordinary, with 137 journalists and media assistants killed since March 2003, sometimes in attacks specifically directed at reporters and media organizations.2 Also troubling is the frequency with which Iraqi and coalition forces have detained journalists without charge.3
In the larger view, it is undeniable that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein enabled independent journalism to become established in Iraq, despite general security conditions that make it a life-threatening enterprise. But even there the picture is mixed. During both coalition and subsequent Iraqi administrations, authorities have laid limits on reporting news that could in any way be seen as promoting the views of insurgents or adherents of Saddam Hussein.4
For the purpose of taking stock, the practices of the US with regard to press freedom are important to examine, as historically the US has often been on the cutting edge of legal protection for speech, its constitutional standards often exceeding other countries’ legal safeguards. Unfortunately, under the Bush administration, there have been significant steps backwards.
The Bush administration was notably more hostile to releasing information to the press than prior administrations, moving to reclassify information that had been in the public domain, to reverse the presumption toward disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, and to greatly restrict public access to presidential papers, an important source of information on public policy.5 The government also showed an unusual determination to force investigative reporters to disclose confidential sources, while Congress yet again failed to create a federal “shield law.”6 When scandals surfaced that could impugn the administration, its first reaction was to retaliate by announcing leak investigations against the press, as when the Washington Post revealed the existence of secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers (“black sites”), and when the New York Times disclosed that the National Security Agency was illegally snooping on millions of domestic and international calls.
In the US, reporters on the receiving end of official leaks generally do not face prosecution, but there were signs that this may change. Figures in both the administration and the political right-wing press called for espionage prosecutions of newspapers in the wake of these scandals. In August 2005 the federal government indicted two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for receiving leaked national defense information from a US official and then repeating it to foreign officials and reporters. The AIPAC case raised concern as a stepping stone to future prosecutions of journalists, as it involves a novel application of a 1917 law that has typically been interpreted as applying only to leakers, rather than recipient publishers, of national defense information.7
It is important to remember that apart from these particular fronts, the press remained in the crosshairs of rights-abusing governments the world over. Cuba in 2006 held some 25 journalists in prison for political crimes, and in Venezuela the Chavez administration further restrained critical reporting through “gag” laws and control of the courts.8 In Sudan, security forces have been arresting and detaining journalists, banning newspaper editions and performing pre-print inspections—and this is apart from routine restrictions on media reporting on Darfur.9 Burma, Turkmenistan, and North Korea continue to be black holes for press freedom (and many other freedoms besides) while Iran and Saudi Arabia have kept journalists on a tight leash even as online communications have taken off. The list of literal and legal attacks on the press goes on and on, with Reporters Without Borders listing, at this writing, 95 journalists and media assistants killed in 2006, an increase over the prior four years, and 135 imprisoned.10 A rare bright spot was a decision by the UK House of Lords to restore a measure of balance to that country’s notorious libel law by providing greater protections for information that is of public interest.11
1 Frederick Douglass, speaking in the Boston Music Hall after an anti-slavery meeting had been broken up. David J. Brewer, World’s Best Orations (St. Louis: Ferd. P. Kaiser, 1899), vol. 5, pp.1906-1909. Also at http://douglassarchives.org/doug_a68.htm.
2 Reporters Without Borders, “War in Iraq,” undated, http://www.rsf.org/special_iraq_en.php3.
3 Ann Cooper, “Jailing Iraqi Journalists,” Dangerous Assignments, October 4, 2005, http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2005/DA_fall05/comment/comment_DA_fall05.html. Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, a CBS cameraman, was held by US forces without charge for almost a year and his case ultimately dismissed in April 2006 for lack of evidence. Bilal Hussein, a photojournalist with Associated Press whose pictures of Fallujah won the Pulitzer Prize, is in his seventh month of detention by US forces at this writing.
4 See, for example, Mariah Blake, “From All Sides: In the Deadly Cauldron of Iraq, Even the Arab Media are Being Pushed Off the Story,” Columbia Journalism Review (2005), http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/2/onthejob-blake.asp, and Committee to Protect Journalists, “Iraq: Government instructs media to promote leadership’s positions,” November 12, 2004, http://www.cpj.org/news/2004/Iraq12nov04na.html. Most recently, the authorities closed two television stations for broadcasting images of Iraqis protesting the sentencing of Saddam Hussein to death, adding to the media blackout caused by temporary official suspension of the major newspapers. Reporters Without Borders, “Two TV stations closed for showing Iraqis protesting against death sentence for Saddam,” November 6, 2006, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=19599.
5 See Floyd Abrams, “The State of Free Speech,” New York Law Journal, vol. 236 (2006).
6 Although a majority of states have enacted “shield laws” to protect reporters from having to disclose their confidential sources, various bills to provide a federal privilege have been stuck in both houses of Congress. For an account of both legislative developments and various reporters who have been jailed for refusing to divulge their sources, see Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “Special Report: Reporters and Federal Subpoenas,” October 13, 2006 http://www.rcfp.org/shields_and_subpoenas.html#shield.
7 Adam Liptak, “In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists,” New York Times, April 30, 2006.
8 “IAPA meeting ends with severe criticism of press freedom in the hemisphere,” Inter American Press Association news release, March 14, 2005, http://www.sipiapa.org/pressreleases/chronologicaldetail.cfm?PressReleaseID=1336.
9 “Sudan: Press Under Pressure,” Human Rights Watch news release, November 6, 2006, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/11/06/darfur14514.htm.
10 Reporters Without Borders, “Press Freedom Barometer,” covering data from January to October 2006, http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=113. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 46 confirmed cases of journalists killed in 2006 as of November 7, 2006, http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed06.html.
11 Jameel v. Wall Street Journal Europe, UKHL 44 (October 11, 2006).
January 2007
Incitement to commit a crime is an offense in many legal systems around the world, and specific laws prohibiting incitement to terrorist acts are increasingly common. Such conduct sometimes can be reached through accomplice liability and conspiracy laws as well. The crime of direct incitement generally requires that the message directly encourage the commission of a crime, and that the speaker intend this, whether or not a criminal act results. In the United States, constitutional jurisprudence requires that the incitement present a risk of “imminent” criminal action; in Europe, the courts tend to allow somewhat more latitude with respect to the risk of proximate causation.
What is new on the scene is the proliferation of crimes of “indirect incitement,” that is, criminalization of speech which is thought to have some potential to incite criminal action, but which may be less targeted in message or audience and less obviously a proximate cause of actual criminal acts. These laws are often ambiguous on whether the proscribed speech must merely portray terrorism or terrorists—variously or vaguely defined—in a favorable light to an outside observer, or whether it must be specifically intended to spur violent criminal acts and present a real risk of doing so under the circumstances.
In 2004 only three European countries had laws against “apologie” or “glorification” of terrorism, but by mid-November 2006 some 36 countries had signed the Council of Europe Convention on Terrorism which requires states to criminalize “provocation” of terrorism, a crime that could include indirect incitement.12 The new crime is catching on in domestic law. Spain and France had apologie laws on the books prior to 2001; the United Kingdom and Denmark have more recently adopted laws on promotion or glorification of terrorist acts, while Turkey and Russia in 2006 amended terrorism legislation in ways that would punish speech characterized, respectively, as “propaganda” for terrorism or support of “extremism.”
Australia has been considering following the model of the UK Terrorism Act of 2006, which outlaws “glorification” where it is reasonable to infer that the audience would understand the speech as encouraging emulation of terrorist conduct. There is no qualification in the UK law, however, for either imminent danger that a terrorist act would be committed, or the speaker’s intention to cause such a result. It is important to recognize that acts of glorification or apologie are the basis for more than penal consequences: they also may lead to blacklisting of organizations for the purpose of halting fundraising or freezing assets, as in the UK, or to deportation of aliens, as in France.
The crime of indirect incitement has to be seen as an effort to go beyond situations where the evidence shows that the speaker clearly intends to provoke the audience to criminal conduct. There are strong reasons to question whether there is, in fact, room for principled distinction between controversial but protected political speech and indirect incitement.13 In the UK, some have sought to distinguish between those who carry placards praising the perpetrators of the London 7/7 attacks and those whose placards urge murder of critics of Islam. Others have worried that glorification laws could be used against Muslims who speak in favor of armed resistance against occupation, expression which is typically viewed as a form of protected, if controversial, political speech. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s statement that juries would understand glorification “when they see it” underscored the fears of minorities that the definition would be subject to the popular prejudices of the moment.14
If counterterrorism has been the motive for new speech-restrictive laws in Europe, it also has become a pretext for repression of political dissent in places such as Uzbekistan. Treated as an ally in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks by Washington and Moscow, Uzbekistan significantly intensified its persecution of independent reporters and human rights monitors, justifying this crackdown as a legitimate counterterrorism response. And it did so with particular energy against those who contradicted the government’s claims that Islamist terrorists, rather than government agents, were responsible for massacring hundreds of unarmed civilians in Andijan in May 2005.15 Despite commitments to reform its laws, Jordan still prosecutes writers for criminal defamation of government leaders and officials or for material that endangers foreign relations. In June 2006 the state jailed four parliamentarians who paid a condolence call to the family of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi; one of the four also allegedly called al-Zarqawi “a martyr and a fighter.” The charge against the four was stirring up sectarian or racial tension or strife among different elements of the nation.16
But it is in Spain that one finds one of the stranger prosecutions for apologie, which ended in acquittal in November 2006. Impelled by the Association of Terrorism Victims, the government indicted a Basque punk rock band for allegedly praising separatist terrorism in the lyrics of its songs. The group denied supporting terrorists and explicitly disavowed supporting the armed ETA insurgency when it was alleged that their songs were hurtful to the ETA’s victims. Under the European Court’s jurisprudence, works of art and political speech are both to be given an extra degree of latitude. Even so, the prosecutor sought not only to imprison the band, but to bar them from working as musicians.17
12 The treaty was adopted in May 2005. At this writing only Bulgaria and Russia have ratified it; the treaty requires six ratifications to enter into force. Article 5.1 of the treaty defines “public provocation to commit a terrorist offence” as making a message available to the public, through either direct or indirect advocacy, with the intent to incite the commission of a terrorist offense and causing a danger that such an offense be committed. Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism, May 16, 2005, CETS No. 196, http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/196.htm. Security Council Resolution 1624 adopted on September 14, 2005, also calls on states to legally prohibit “incitement” to commit terrorist acts, but with explicit reference in its preamble to the boundaries created by the international right of free expression.
13 See Opinion of the Commissioner for Human Rights, Alvaro Gil-Robles, on the draft Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism, Strasbourg, February 2, 2005, BCommDH(2005), para. 26 (Gil-Robles notes, “The question is where the boundary lies between indirect incitement to commit terrorist acts and the legitimate voicing of criticism.”).
14 Jon Silverman, “Glorification law passes ‘first test,’” BBC News Online, February 16, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4720682.stm.
15 Human Rights Watch, Burying the Truth: Uzbekistan Rewrites the Story of the Andijan Massacre, vol. 15, no. 6(D), September 2005, http://hrw.org/reports/2005/uzbekistan0905/ and “Uzbekistan: Journalist Assaulted after Reporting on Massacre,” Human Rights Watch news release, November 11, 2005, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/11/11/uzbeki12007.htm.
16 “Jordan: Rise in Arrests Restricting Free Speech,” Human Rights Watch news release, June 17, 2006, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/06/17/jordan13574.htm.
17 “Band Sozidad Alkoholika denies lyrics aimed at praising terrorism,” EITB 24, November 2, 2006, http://www.eitb24.com/portal/eitb24/noticia/en/politics/national-court-trial-band-soziedad-alkoholika-denies-lyrics-aimed?itemId=B24_18543&cl=%2Feitb24%2Fpolitica&idioma=en/.
January 2007
New Twists on Old Offenses: Hate Speech and Blasphemy
As the examples above suggest, there is a good deal of blurring between the rationales of hate speech and of indirect incitement. The formulation of indirect incitement, praising terrorism as “just and necessary” or holding up for admiration known terrorists, is often intertwined with derision or denigration of victims or opponents. Although there are differences in the two types of proscriptions, both derive from an appreciation of the power of speech to facilitate mass violence.
The state has a legal option to limit speech to protect national security or other state interests. But prohibiting hate speech is obligatory under several major human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the later Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The ICCPR does not require states to punish hate speech as a crime, but many states interpret CERD as requiring criminal proscription of hate speech. Many states have entered reservations or interpretations to these provisions in consideration of protecting the right to free expression.18
Hate speech is indeed hateful. It can also be deeply harmful, even when it does not incite imminent violence or criminal acts, in that it can provoke public and self-denigration, and a great deal of psychological pain. The point of freedom of expression, however, is to preserve space for highly controversial or even deeply offensive speech, as socially acceptable messages seldom need protection. The hate speech provisions of the ICCPR were negotiated by parties with fresh memories of the Holocaust, and their concern was less to spare group sensibilities from insult than to establish that hate speech, even when not direct incitement, often played a key role in facilitating violence and state discrimination against minorities.19
In the decades following the Holocaust, however, the goal of social equality became a more prominent rationale for hate speech prohibitions, particularly in Europe. Laws and prosecutions for hate speech often seemed focused on limiting certaincontent no matter the context, and seemed unmoored from hard analysis of whether the speech in question, however repugnant, had any potential actually to incite violence or any other criminal action by third parties. The shift to this rationale could be seen in the controversial trial court judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Nahimana case, where the court construed hate speech as a basis for “persecution” as a crime against humanity. It wrote:
Hate speech is a discriminatory form of aggression that destroys the dignity of those in the group under attack. It creates a lesser status not only in the eyes of the group members themselves but also in the eyes of others who perceive and treat them as less than human. The denigration of persons on the basis of their ethnic identity or other group membership in and of itself, as well as in its other consequences, can be an irreversible harm.20
The competition between two rationales—hate speech as a catalyst of criminal acts, versus hate speech as a harm to dignity in and of itself—has not always been obvious, nor have the problems of assessing harm to dignity in a democratic society or a world of global communications. The Danish cartoon scandal brought these tensions into vivid relief.
On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed that it said were solicited in an effort to overcome self-censorship. The cartoons were highly offensive to Muslims, because Islam is frequently interpreted to prohibit depictions of the Prophet and some of the depictions were extremely derogatory, for example, by associating him, and by implication all Muslims, with terrorism. Denmark declined to take action against the publishers, citing its own obligations to protect free expression. Beyond this, it also declined to apologize for the cartoons. By February 2006, massive and often violent protests against the cartoons and against Denmark spread throughout the Muslim world.
The context for the protests included the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, tensions in Israel/Palestine, rising Western prejudice and suspicion against Muslims as “terrorists,” and an associated sense of persecution and social alienation on the part of Muslim minorities in many parts of the world. Against the backdrop of travel restrictions, debates over the public acceptability of women in hijab, terrorism blacklists, deportations, and investigations of Muslim charities, the cartoons were felt as particularly denigrating, and to some Muslims may have conveyed a quality of threat.
Criticism of the cartoons, however, seldom focused on their directly provoking discrimination or violence against Muslim communities, but rather they focused on equality issues more generally. The unwillingness of Denmark to either take action against the newspaper or apologize was contrasted with the proliferation of Holocaust-denial laws and blasphemy laws protecting Christianity in Europe. The discourse on whether the media had a right to publish the cartoons became confused with whether the media were right to do so. While the European emphasis on equality and non-discrimination as values prompted much soul-searching as to whether Denmark had taken the proper course, Muslim states by and large did not respond to retorts that they permit abusive depictions of and speech about religious minorities in their jurisdictions; indeed, Iran sponsored an anti-Semitic Holocaust denial cartoon contest in response.
The after-effects of the controversy have been significant. Governments with large Muslim populations, including Jordan, Yemen, Syria, India, and Algeria, pressed charges against editors and journalists who reproduced the cartoons, and newspapers were censored, suspended or closed in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Belarus, South Africa, and Russia. The Organization of the Islamic Conference criticized Denmark and has sought a UN General Assembly statement banning attacks on religious beliefs. On September 8, 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a global counterterrorism strategy that contained the phrase, “and to promote mutual respect for and prevent defamation of religions.” In a speech before the UN General Assembly on September 20, 2006, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf called for a ban on the “defamation of Islam.”21
This response, in essence an international endorsement of blasphemy laws as part of counterterrorism strategy, is exactly the wrong direction for any state that values robust discourse and democratic values. While critics are right to point to the selectivity of existing European blasphemy laws in protecting only Christianity, the key question here is why any religious system should be legally shielded from criticism or even ridicule when political beliefs, aesthetic views, or cultural opinions are not. Speech which targets religious believers for criminal acts should not be protected, but speech which derides only religious ideas should not be punished.
This approach avoids imposing criminal penalties for either blasphemous or hateful speech that threatens dignity but not crime. It is more consistent with the primary articulation of the ban on hate speech in article 20 of the ICCPR than an approach which places whole categories of speech outside protection. Article 20 requires states to prohibit “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence” (emphasis added). The term “advocacy” implies that there must be a conscious intent to spur hatred, rather than just approval of or inadvertent contribution to hatred. The fact that the advocacy of hatred must additionally constitute incitement points to provocation of an action, rather than merely fostering negative feelings (since that is already specified by “hatred”), and violence and discrimination are two species of criminal acts. But what has never been clear is exactly what “hostility” entails, although the construction implies something beyond hatred, involving overt manifestation of hatred against another. An argument can be made that the sort of hostility that calls for imprisonment for speech in a democratic society must amount at minimum to a criminal level of harassment, and not to expression of repugnant opinions or impugning of reputation.22
18 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Prosecutor v. Kordić and Cerkez, Case No. IT-95-14/2-T, Judgment (Trial Chamber) of 26 February 2001, sec. 209 n.272.
19 See Manfred Nowak, CCPR Commentary (Kehl: N.P. Engel, 1993), p.366, para. 15.
20 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, The Prosecutor v. Nahimana et al., Case No. ICTR-99-52-T, Judgment (Trial Chamber) of 3 December 2003, p.351, sec. 1072.
21 Just as the original furor appeared to be quieting, a video came to light of activists from the far-right Danish People’s Party at a summer camp drawing more derogatory images of the Prophet Muhammad. Iran and Indonesia summoned their Danish ambassadors to protest, and the Danish prime minister denounced the drawing of the cartoons, if not the airing of the video. Danish imams who had traveled abroad to rally support to protest the original cartoons, however, stated they would not let themselves be provoked this time. “Row over Danish cartoons escalates,” BBC News Online, October 10, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6037597.stm. The action of Denmark in criticizing the cartoons was significant, and highlights the difference between the state moving to repress the publisher of offensive speech, and the state taking measures to repudiate the offensive and discriminatory message.
22 Manfred Nowak has argued that article 20, while providing an additional basis for restricting free expression, cannot authorize restrictions beyond the terms of what article 19 allows, so that, for example, it would not permit punishing freedom of opinion, nor permit pre-censorship, nor would it allow for sanctions to attach without consideration of the interests enumerated in article 19.3 in respect of which speech may be restricted. Nowak, CCPR Commentary, pp. 368-369. This view finds support in the Human Rights Committee’s General Comment 11 on article 20, which states, “In the opinion of the Committee, these required prohibitions are fully compatible with the right of freedom of expression as contained in article 19, the exercise of which carries with it special duties and responsibilities.” UN Human Rights Committee, General Comment 11, Article 20 (Nineteenth session, 1983), Compilation of General Comments and General Recommendations Adopted by Human Rights Treaty Bodies, U.N. Doc. HRI\GEN\1\Rev.1 at 12 (1994). Although it is permissible under article 19 to enact laws against defamation, criminal penalties are strongly disfavored under international jurisprudence. Human Rights Watch’s policy on hate speech treads a middle ground between US constitutional practice and article 20 of the ICCPR by accepting the criminalization of hate speech where there is a danger of inciting imminent violence, discrimination or hostility, with “hostility” understood to entail criminal harassment or intimidation.
<<previous | index | next>>
https://www.hrw.org/legacy/test/wr2k7/essays/shrinking/bak/2.htm
Newsessentials Blog 
Posted on April 30, 2024
0